LIBRARY OF CO^[GRESS, 



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Ao, II, A 1 LA^ Or,Klr.6. Viicc^ '4r> (cut: 



THEOLOGICAL UNREST: 



DISCUSSIONS IN 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 



CONTENTS: 

Science and Theology— Ancient and Modern. 

Part I. By James Atithojiy Fronde. Page i 

Part II. By James A^itJiony Froude. " 15 

Part III. Reply to Mr. Froude. 

By Prof. P. G. Tait, University of Ediiibiirgh. 30 

The Conflict of Religion and Science. 

By Rev. Edward A. Washburn y D.D. 4>| 



New York : 
A. S. BARNES & CO., 

Ill t\: 113 William Street. 

Cot>vyi:^h!. T.^-o. /■:' . ( . .V. BArtu's &f Co. 






NOTE 



The following brilliant essays present the most forcible 
arguments that have lately appeared on both sides of the 
questions at issue between Science and Religion. They 
are now offered collectively for the first time, in the hope 
that so concise a statement of the whole case as is here 
given will be appreciated by all fair-minded people. 



ATLAS SERIES OF ESSAYS 

BY THE BEST WRITERS ON ENDURING THEMES. 

q^^ No. II. Price 25 Cents. 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION, 

AN ARGUMENT. 



CHAPTER I 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY— ANCIENT AND 

MODERN/ 

EACH generation of mankind thinks highly of its own impro- 
tance and inclines to believe that it will mark an epoch in 
human history. All of us who live out our seventy years witness 
impressive changes. If we add to our personal experience the 
accounts which we hear from our fathers of the state of things 
which they remember in their own childhood, the individual recol- 
lections of each of us extend back over nearly a century ; and every 
century brings with it alterations of action and sentiment, which are 
depressing or exhilarating according to the constitution of our minds, 
but are always on a scale to force upon us a sense of the instability 
of all opinions and institutions, and of the complicated influences 
which control the fortunes of our race. The revolutions may be 
intrinsically less violent than they seem to those who have borne a 
part in them. Events which at the time of their occurrence appear 
of world-wide moment, are seen afterward to have been without real 
significance. As we look back over history we perceive long periods 
apparently level and unbroken. Then, as now, perhaps old men 
drew contrasts between past and present, spoke eloquently of 
national degeneracy, or warmed into enthusiasm over a better time 
that had set in. To us, as we survey these periods from a distance, 
there will appear to have been few changes either for good or evil, 

' Frdm the International Review. 



4 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 

and each generation will seem extremely like its predecessors. The 
English of Shakespeare or Swift were not essentially different from 
the English of to-day. The accidents of life alter rapidly. The inner 
nature alters very slowly. We feel acutely the alterations which we 
have witnessed, because they are close to us ; but at least half the 
impression is due to changes in ourselves rather than in what is 
round us. We grow old ; we look back on the past with affectionate 
regret, as when we were young we looked to the future with hope 
and enthusiasm. We do not see the sordid details of vulgar reality; 
we are unconscious poets and idealize without being aware of it. 

Nevertheless there are times when change is really rapid, so 
rapid that the character of it cannot be mistaken ; times when a 
Rip van Winkle who went to sleep in his youth would wake in 
manhood to find himself in a world remade, all habits altered, all 
the most cherished opinions swept away as in a whirlwind. Some 
violent convulsion may have done it — a reformation or a French 
Revolution shaking society like an earthquake — or the same effect 
may have been produced more quietly by a swift, silent operation, 
as if mankind had broken suddenly from the anchorage and were 
hurried away by some irresistible current from all their bearings and 
associations. 

Allowing for the tendency to exaggerate our self-importance, 
there is reason to think that we are ourselves living in one of these 
exceptional epochs ; that we have been launched into a current 
which has already carried us out of sight of most of our old landmarks, 
and is rushing forward with us with accelerating velocity. For the 
last fifty years science has conferred upon us new and extraordinary 
powers of rapid communication. Ideas are interchanged, produc- 
tions are interchanged, the human inhabitants of the globe cafi 
move to and fro with an ease and speed never before known or 
dreamed of ; and we are surrounded with vast political catastrophes, 
empires rising and falling, races forming new combinations, pre- 
judices breaking down, whole continents opened out for the forma- 
tion of new and mighty nationalities, a universal levelling of all 
old distinctions, as if mankind had been resolved into a thousand 
million units to reorganize in fresh combinations, suited to an 
altered order of things. Look alone at Great Britain. At the close 
of the French war Great Britain had but half of its present popula- 
tion and a fifth of its present wealth. Lancashire was still an 
agricultural county. Our manufactures were but as the lading 
of a Thames barge compared to the freight of an ocean steamer. 



ANCIENT AND MODERN. 5 

Colonies we had few, and those valued by us but as markets for 
our uncertain commerce. Ships crawled to and fro across the At- 
lantic, spending six weeks upon the voyage. As many months 
were consumed on a voyage to India or China. The landed aris- 
tocracy ruled in St. Stephens, and " use and wont" in the length 
and breadth of the island. Stage-coaches rolled sleepily along the 
unmacadamized high-roads. The impatient traveler, who was not 
afraid of fatigue, might reach Edinburgh from London in two days 
and nights. The magnate, who preferred his own carriage and his 
own horses, was a fortnight on the way. 

Each neighborhood supplied its own necessities and its own 
amusements. The weaver made cloth at his solitary loom for the 
tailor to cut into clothes in the adjoining village. The old wife in 
the cottage spun her own yarn, and knitted her own and her hus- 
band's and children's stockings. The gentry confined their visits 
within a circle of ten miles. Their daughters depended for their 
larger acquaintance on the balls and races in the county town. 
Schools there were none, except for the well-to-do. The village 
boys and girls learnt their catechism at the parish church, and were 
bound apprentices for the rest of their education. All the country 
over, from the expense and difficulty of movement, each family 
was rooted to its own soil, and the summer migrations of the 
squires and parsons were confined, like that of the Vicar of Wake- 
field, to a change from the blue room to the brown. 

Under these conditions, we who are now turned middle age be- 
gan our existence ; our hopes modest, our ambition limited to one 
or other of the three black graces ; our horizon bounded, at fur- 
thest, by the limits of our own island, and our knowledge of the 
rest of the globe extending but to names upon maps, huge por- 
tions of which remained blank, or to books of travels which were 
not accurately distinguished from the voyages of Gulliver or Rob- 
inson Crusoe or Sindbad the Sailor. 

Our spiritual state was the counterpart of our material state. 
We learnt what our fathers had learnt before us : Greek and Latin, 
and arithmetic and geometry, Greek and Roman history, and, in 
some favored instances, little English history, conceived from an 
insular point of view. Modern languages we despised, and of mod- 
ern European literature we knew nothing. Physical science was 
regarded rather as an amusement of dilettanteism than as an occu- 
pation for serious men. Of astronomy, we were taught the general 
results. We knew, in words, that the earth was round ; that it 



6 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 

travelled round the sun as one of its planets ; and that the solar 
system was perhaps but one of an infinite number of such systems. 
But the knowledge had not penetrated beyond our memories. For 
practical purposes, we still believed that our own earth was the 
most important part of the universe, and man the central object for 
which all else had been made. Electricity was a toy, geology a 
paradoxical novelty. Critical history had not commenced its 
massacre of illusions. Schoolboys were taught to believe in the 
Seven Kings* Rome. British antiquarians could insist modestly 
that Brute of Troy need not be a fable. Chemists still talked of 
the four elements. The keen, piercing process by which tradition- 
ary teachings on all subjects have since been brought to the bar to 
answer for themselves, was still unheard of in any single depart- 
ment of human study. 

A condition so stationary, so controlled outwardly and inward- 
ly by habit, corresponded to the stable character of the English 
nation. Below the outward life and the intellectual cultivation 
lay a foundation of morality based upon authority. We must 
all live. Children must be taught that a certain conduct is 
required of them ; that there is a rule of duty to which they 
must conform. In a wholesome condition of society no ques- 
tions are asked as to what duty means, or why it is obligatory. 
The idea of duty lies in the constitution of things, and the 
source of it is the will of the maker of the world. Sixty years 
ago speculations on the origin of the universe were confined to a 
few curious or idle people ; the multitude of us believed without 
the slightest conscious misgiving that the world was made by God 
— that he had made himself known in a revelation which had been 
guaranteed by miracles, and had himself declared the law which we 
were required to obey — and that in the Bible, further, we had a his- 
tory of God's actions and intentions toward us, every word of which 
was indisputably true. 

Such a conviction was for all practical purposes universally 
received throughout England and America, at least during the 
first half of this century. Of course we know that there were 
persons who did not believe ; but we were satisfied that in Christian 
countries disbelief was caused by moral depravity. There were 
infidels in religion as there were monsters in crime ; but infidelity, 
we were assured, was not a mistake, but a sin. It was the result of a 
culpable misuse of faculties, which if fairly employed could arrive 
only at an orthodox conclusion. I remember that when I was a 



ANCIENT AND MODERN. y 

little boy, there was a family in the corner of the parish supposed 
to entertain eccentric opinions on these subjects. They were harm- 
less and respectable, but they did not go to church, and naturally 
were called atheists. We looked at them with a vague terror. If 
we passed their door, we hurried by as if the place were haunted. 
At last the old mother died. The husband asked that the body 
might be buried without being taken into the church. It would, I 
believe, have been illegal. At any rate the request was refused, and 
I recollect, when the matter was talked over, hearing it said that 
people who did not believe in God believed often in the devil, and 
that inside the church the devil had special power to take hold of an 
atheist. Some months after, one summer evening, I saw the hus- 
band stealing down to the churchyard to visit his wife's grave. His 
look was gentle, sad, abstracted, full of human sorrow and human 
sensibility. I recollect a sense of startled pity for the poor old man, 
mixed with doubts whether it was not impious to entertain such a 
feeling. ' 

We were under the influence of the remnants of a superstition 
which in other days lit the fires at Smithfield, and of course it was 
absurd and horrible. Yet when a creed has been made the base on 
which moral convictions and moral conduct are rested, it can not 
be questioned without grave consequences. We can not build our 
lives on a balance of probabilities ; and unless we take for granted 
the essential principles of duty, we can make nothing out of an 
existence at all. The clerk in Eastcheap, as Mr. Carlyle says, can not 
be forever verifying his ready-reckoner. The world, when it is in a 
healthy state, will always look askance at persons who insist that 
the ready-reckoners require revision. 

Yet times come when the calculation becomes so terribly wrongs 
that the revision can not be put off any longer. It is but necessary 
to describe such a condition of feeling to be aware how far we 
have been driven from it — far as the era lies of railroads and tele- 
graphs and ocean steamers from the era of stage-coaches and Rus- 
sells wagons. Whither these material changes may be carrying us, 
it is idle to conjecture. Nothing of the same kind has ever been 
witnessed on the earth before, and there is no experience to guide 
us. The spiritual change is not so unexampled. Phenomena 
occurred most curiously analogous at the time of the rise of Chris- 
tianity ; and from the singularly parallel course in which at these 
two periods the intellect developed itself, we may infer generally 
what is likely to come of it. 



8 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 

That we have been started out of our old positions, and that we 
can never return to positions exactly the same is too plain to be 
questioned. Theologians no longer speak with authority. They 
are content to suggest, and to deprecate hasty contradiction. Those 
who doubted before, now openly deny. Those who believed on trust 
have passed into uncertainty. Those who uphold orthodoxy can 
not agree on what ground to defend it. Throughout Europe, 
throughout the world, the gravest subjects are freely discussed, and 
opposite sides may be taken without blame from society. Doctrines 
once fixed as a rock are now fluid as water. Truth is what men 
trow. Things are what men think. Certainty neither is nor 
can be more than the agreement of persons competent to form an 
opinion, and when competent persons cease to agree the certain 
has become doubtful — doubtful from the necessity of the case. 
This is a simple matter of fact. What is generally doubted is doubt- 
ful. It is a conclusion from which there is no escape. The univer- 
sal assent which constitutes certainty has been dissolved into the 
conflicting sentiments of individual thinkers. 

First principles are necessarily assumptions. They can not 
prove themselves. For three centuries all Protestant communities 
assumed as a first principle the infallibility of the Bible. They 
regarded the writers of the various books as the automatic instru- 
ments of the Holy Spirit ; and pious and simple people held in 
entire consistency that if the Bible was a rule of faith where each 
person, learned or unlearned, could find the truth, the translations 
must be inspired also. These positions were safe so long, and so 
long only, as it was held to be sinful to challenge them. Wisely do 
men invest authority, whether of writing or person, with a sacred 
character. The mass of men can only be made to feel the superi- 
ority of what is higher than themselves when it is surrounded with 
a certain atmosphere of dignity. It is essential to society that 
princes and magistrates shall be regarded with respect, for they 
represent not themselves only, but the law which they administer. 
The sovereign function is gone if every intruding blockhead may 
take his sovereign by the hand and examine with his own eyes of 
what matter kings are composed. The blockhead can not be made 
to understand for himself why authority ought to be obeyed. He is 
therefore properly placed when he can not reach to measure himself 
against it. The outward protection taken away, the illusion is gone. 
The judge without his robe may retain his intellectual supremacy, but 
his intellectual supremacy will inspire no awe in the vulgar crowd. 
Stripped of robe and ceremony he appears but a common man. 



ANCIENTAND MODERN. 9 

The spell of sanctity once broken, the Bible once approached, 
exanmined, and studied, as other books, an analogous result has 
followed. The critic has approached tenderly and respectfully, but 
the approach at all implies an assumption of a right to question the 
supernatural character of the object of his investigation. Certainty 
passes into probability, and the difference between certainty and 
probability is not in degree but in kind. A human witness is sub- 
stituted for a divine witness, and faith is changed into opinion. The 
authority of the translation was the first to be shaken. Then vari- 
ations in the MSS. destroyed the confidence in the original text. If 
the original language was miraculously communicated, there was 
a natural presumption that it would be miraculously preserved. It 
had not been miraculously preserved, and the inference of doubt 
extended backward on the inspiration. 

The origin of the different books was next inquired into, with 
their authorship and antiquity. At each step the uncertainty be- 
came deeper. The gospel history itself was found to be a labyrinth 
of perplexities. The divine sanction for accuracy and authenticity 
once obscured, the popular sense which had cleared the modern 
world of superstition, and had driven the supernatural out of secu- 
lar history, began to a^k on what ground the Bible miracles were to 
be believed if all other miracles were to be rejected. Geology 
forced itself forward, and declared that the history of the creation 
in the Book of Genesis was irreconcilable with ascertained facts. 
Along the whole line the defending forces are falling back, not know- 
ing where to make a stand ; and materialism all over Europe stands 
frankly out and is respectfully listened to when it affirms that the 
war is over, that the claims of revelation can not be maintained, and 
that the existence of God and of a future state, the origin of man, 
the nature of conscience, and the meaning of the distinctions 
between good and evil are all open questions. 

No serious consequences, at least in England and America, are 
as yet outwardly apparent. We are a law-abiding race ; the mass of 
us are little given to unpractical speculation. We are too earnest to 
tolerate impiety, and the traditions of religion will retain their hold 
with the millions long after they have lost their influence over the 
intellect. Intellect we know is not omniscient. Emotion has a 
voice in the matter, which is always on the side of faith, and women 
in such subjects are governed almost wholly by their feelings. The 
entire generation at present alive may probably pass away before 
the inward change shows itself markedly in external symptoms. 



10 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 

None the less it is quite certain that the ark of religious opinion has 
drifted from its moorings, that it is moving with increasing speed 
along a track which it will never retrace, and towards issues infi- 
nitely momentous. What are these issues to be ? " The thing that 
hath been, that shall be again." 

Once before the civilized nations of Europe had a religion on which 
their laws were founded, and by which their lives and actions were 
governed. Once before it failed them, and they were driven back 
upon philosophy. Allowing for the difference of times, the intellec- 
tual phenomena were precisely the same as those which we have 
ourselves experienced. The philosophic schools passed through the 
same stages, and the latest of them arrived at the same conclusion, 
that the universe of things could be explained by natural causes ; 
and as no symptom could be discovered of any special divine inter- 
ference with the action of those causes, so there was no occasion 
for supposing that such interference had ever been or ever would 
be. The scientific triumph, as it was then regarded, was proclaimed 
as a new message of glad tidings to mankind. It was believed by 
politicians and philosophers, by poets and historians. It was never 
believed by the mass of simple-minded people, who held on in spite 
of it to the traditions of the old faith, till Christianity rose out of 
the dying ashes of paganism, restored conscience to its supre- 
macy, and made real belief in God once more possible. 

Human nature remains what it always was. The nature of God, 
and the relation in which man stands to God, are the same now as 
they were when man first began to be. The truth of fact is what it 
is, independent, happily, of our notions of it. We do not make 
truth by recognizing it ; we can not unmake truth by denying it. 
So much of it as it concerns us practically to know we learn by expe- 
rience, as we learn every natural lesson ; and if man is not permit- 
ted to live and prosper in this world without an acknowledgment of 
his Maker, the scientific experiment will fail as it failed before. The 
existing forms of religion may dissolve, but the truth which is the 
soul of religion will revive more vigorous than ever. The analogy is 
the more impressive the more closely we compare the details of the 
two periods. 

No one knows distinctly how the pagan religions began. Some 
say they were corruptions of patriarchal traditions ; some trace them 
to fear and ignorance; some to consciousness of responsibility; 
some to the involuntary awe forced upon the mind by the star- 
spangled sky and the majestic motion through it of sun, moon, and 



ANCIENT AND MODERN. II 

planets. All these influences probably were combined to excite 
each other, the last, as was most natural, giving shape and form to 
the emotion of piety. The number 12 and the number 7, occur- 
ring, as they do, in all the old mythologies, point unmistakably 
to the twelve months and to the seven celestial bodies visible 
from the earth, which have a proper motion of their own among 
the stars. However the idea was generated, it seized on the 
minds of men as soon as born with an irresistible fascination, and 
took direction of their whole being. The nobler nations assigned 
to God, or the gods, the moral government of mankind. The will 
of the gods was the foundation of their legislation. Law was to be 
obeyed because it was so ordered by the maker and master of the 
world. The early Greek or Roman directed his whole life by the 
reference of every particle of it to the gods as entirely as the most 
devout of Catholic Christians. Meanwhile fancy and imagination wan- 
dered in the expanse of possibilities, giving these airy creations a local 
habitation and a name. The law was stern and severe. A brighter 
aspect was given to religion in music and song and sacrifice, and 
legends, and heroic tales ; and poets watched the changing phenom- 
ena of days and nights, and summer and winter, and heat and cold, 
and rain and thunder, and human life, and wove them all into a 
mythology, till there was not a river Avithout its god, a grotto with- 
out its nymph, a wood without its dryad, a noble, heroic man with- 
out a deity for his father. All went flowingly so long as the world 
was young. The vast fabric of unreality grew on without intention 
of fraud ; but the time came when intellect began to ask questions, 
and the stories which were related as sacred truths were seen first 
to be inconsistent, and then to be incredible. The first resource 
for defense was allegory. The stories about the gods were not true 
in themselves, but only figuratively true. Behind the ceremonial of 
the temples lay *' the mysteries" in which the initiated were ad- 
mitted into the real secret. So interpreted. Homer and Hesiod 
continued to be tolerable. But the strength of the traditions was 
weakened insensibly by allegoric dilution. When any thing might 
mean any thing, men began to ask whether any thing at all was 
known about the gods. They looked round them, and into their 
own souls, at the phenomena of real experience, and asked what 
lessons they could discover in facts which could not be disputed. 
• So began Greek philosophy. The tone at first was reverent. 
Order and uniformity was manifest throughout the universe, and 
where order was, it were assumed that there was an ordering mind. 



12 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 

Some thought that the origin of things was " spirit/* others that it 
was "matter ;" some that spirit and matter were co-eternal, others 
that matter had been created by spirit out of nothing. It was 
asked what the nature of spirit was. Was spirit self-existing out- 
side the universe, or was it infused in material substance as the soul 
of a man is in his body? Was it conscious of itself ? or was not the 
most perfect being a serene automaton which needed no considera- 
tion, and therefore never reflected upon itself ? Again, was spirit 
intellectual merely, or was it just and good ? and if good, whence 
came evil ? Such questions cut deep, but they were not necessarily 
irreligious. Plato taught a pure theism. Aristotle believed matter 
to be eternal ; he believed God to be eternal also, and the phe- 
nomena of existence to result from the efforts of matter to shape 
itself after the all-perfect pattern which it saw in God. Even Epi- 
curus did not deny that the gods existed. He denied only that 
there was any trace of their interference with human fortunes. 

The difficulty was to account for sin and misery, if a conscious 
Providence immediately directed every thing. The most popular 
religious solution of the problem was the doctrine of what was called 
plastic nature. Nature was supposed to be a force developing itself 
unconsciously and automatically, as the seed develops into the tree, 
or, as it was ingeniously expressed by Aristotle, " as if the art of the 
shipwright was in the timbers." Each organ of every living thing cor- 
responded to its functions. But the operations of nature were not 
mechanical like human contrivances. Organization was governed 
by laws from within, not by intention directing it from without, and 
nature being imperfect, and only striving after perfection, being pro- 
gressive and not yet complete, her creations partook necessarily of 
her infirmities, and were subject to decay and change. Such a con- 
ception of nature was an earlier form of Spinozism. The bird 
builds its nests, the spider stretches its web automatically. The 
human craftsman, as he becomes skilled in any art, does his work 
more and more spontaneously, and with less and less conscious 
reflection. When he is a master of his business, he makes each 
stroke as surely, yet with as little thought about it, as he lifts his 
food to his mouth. 

With these and the like ingenious speculations, philosophers en- 
deavored to answer the questions which they put to themselves 
about their own nature and the world they lived in ; religion and the 
religious rituals all the while being neither abandoned nor denied, 
but remaining as a dress or a custom which each day was wearing 



ANCIENT AND MODERN. I3 

thinner. And human life all the while was real, as it is now, brief, 
struggling, painful, the plaything of accident, a fire-fly flashing out 
of the darkness, and again disappearing into it ; coming none knew 
whencej going none knew whither : yet while it lasted, with its pas- 
sions and its affections, its crimes and its virtues, its high aspira- 
tions, its mean degradations, its enthusiasms and its remorse, its 
wild bursts of joy and agonies of pain, it was an important posses- 
sion to the owner of it, and speculations about plastic nature 
would not be likely to satisfy him when he demanded the meaning 
of it. Yet demand the meaning of it man will and must. Life is 
too stern to be played with, and as the old creed died into a form, 
and philosophy proved so indifferent a substitute, dark and ter- 
rible notions can be seen rising in Greek poetry- ; notions that there 
were gods, but not good gods ; notions of an inexorable fate ; no- 
tions that men were creatures and playthings of powerful and ma- 
lignant beings who required to be flattered and propitiated, and 
that beyond the grave lay gloomy possibilities of eternal and hor- 
rible suffering. Gone the sunshine of Homer, this healthy vigor, 
unconscious of itself. Gone the frank and simple courage which 
met the storm and the sunshine as they came,untroubled with sickly 
spiritual terrors. In ^schylus, in Sophocles, in Euripides, even 
in Plato himself, the prevailing thought is gloomy and desponding. 
Philosophy, it was plain, had no anodyne to ofTer against the sad 
conviction of the nature of man's life on earth, or availed to allay 
anxiety for what might happen to him hereafter. 

In this condition the Romans came into the inheritance of the 
world, and became its spiritual as well as administrative trustees. 
Their religion, too, had gone like the Greek. They had allowed the 
national divinities of Italy to be identified with the gods of Hellas. 
They had modelled their literature on the Athenian type. They had 
accepted Greek poetry and philosophy as containing the best 
which could be felt or known on the great questions which most 
concerned humanity. But for them some practical theory of life 
was necessary by which they could rule the present, and face the 
future. They were not a people to be troubled with subjective 
sorrows. They were earthly, unideal, material in all that they 
thought and in all that they did. The Roman proconsul, when 
reminded of *' truth," asked scornfully, " What is truth ?" That 
men had bodies he knew well ; whether they had souls or not was 
no matter of present concern. 

Roman statesmen, called as they were to govern the human 



14 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 

race from the British Channel to the Euphrates, had no leisure for 
any such idle disquisitions. Their only care was that their subjects 
should obey their magistrates, live peaceably, thrive, and cultivate 
the earth. For the rest, each individual, so long as he indulged in 
no political illusions or enthusiasms, was free to dream or fancy 
what he pleased. Their own convictions followed the pattern of 
their government. They had no illusions. The material wel- 
fare of man was all that they understood or were interested in, and 
the creed on which they settled down found an exponent in the 
greatest of their poets. The practical misery of mankind had risen 
from wars and crimes. The Romans bade war and crime to cease. 
The spiritual misery of men had been self-caused by fantastic 
imaginations, by groundless terrors, by dreams of supernatural 
powers, whose caprice persecuted them in this world, and whose 
vindictive maHce threatened to make them wretched in the next. 
Religion had been the curse of the earth, and though fools might 
still torture themselves with a belief in it, if they so pleased, 
Lucretius, speaking the very inmost conviction of the imperial 
Roman mind, informed them that religion was a phantom begotten 
of fear and ignorance. The universe, of which man was a part, was 
a system of things which had been generated by natural forces. 
Gods there might be, somewhere in space, created by nature also, 
but not gods who troubled themselves about men. All things pro- 
ceeded from eternity in one unchanging sequence of cause and 
effect, and man had but to understand nature and follow her direc- 
tions to create his own prosperity and his own happiness, undis- 
turbed by fear of supernatural disturbance. If the sufferings and 
enjoyments of this world were distributed by a superintending 
providence, it was a providence which showed no regard for moral 
worth or worthlessness. The good were often miserable, the 
wicked flourished, and a power so careless of justice, even if it 
existed, did not deserve to be reverenced. But it existed only in 
the brain of man. Evils, or what were called evils, were a neces- 
sary part of an imperfect existence. But evil was disarmed of half 
its power to hurt when its origin was known, and the more care- 
fully the laws of nature were studied, the more successfully man 
could contend against it. 

Long before Rome became the world's mistress, the theory had 
been thrown out by Democritus : Epicurus had worked it into shape, 
and it had been the creed of a sect among the Greeks. As soon 
as it had become practically embodied in the Roman system of 



ANCIENT AND MODERN. 15 

government, it was developed into a plain confession of faith, and 
as the legions struck down the nationalities of Asia and Europe, 
the intellect of Lucretius declared the overthrow of their super- 
stitions and proclaimed the sovereignty of science. 

Unlike the Greek mythology, the system of Lucretius was not 
a thing of imagination. Splendidly as his genius illustrated the 
details of the Epicurean philosophy, the system itself was based 
on observation of facts astonishingly accurate, if we consider the 
age at which he lived ; and his inferences were drawn in the 
strictest scientific method. Within the proper limits of physical 
science he anticipated many of the generalizations of the best 
modern scientific thinkers. His moral and spiritual conclusions 
are almost exactly the same as theirs. Spiritual philosophy grows 
out of general principles, and whether those principles be derived 
from a wide or limited induction, whether the facts appealed to 
be completely known or only imperfectly, when once the principles 
are assumed the same deductions will follow. 

Lucretius opens with the most beautiful lines in Latin poetry, 
describing the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. His object was to 
create at once and indelibly the impression which he most desired 
to convey, of the horrors which had been occasioned by religion and 
the dread of the unknown. Had he lived in our time, he would 
have referred to the massacre of St. Bartholomew, to an auto-da- 
fe, or to the burning of a witch. Ignorant of the real causes of 
things, men had ascribed the calamities from which they suffered 
to evil spirits, whom it was necessary to flatter and appease. They 
were frightened as children were frightened at the dark. Their 
terrors would disappear with sounder and clearer knowledge. 

As the modern astronomer believes that the solar, and perhaps 
the sidereal, system was once a mist of fiery dust which became 
condensed by motion into suns and planets, Lucretius conceives 
that space was originally filled with atoms like the motes which we 
see floating in a sunbeam in a dark room. The modern philoso- 
pher derives the first motion from a tendency of floating particles 
of unequal density to rotate. Lucretius postulates a downward 
tendency with lateral declinations from the properties of the atoms 
themselves. Motion once given, coherence begins, and matter 
in combination develops the phenomena which we experience. 
Atoms, germs, monads — call them what we please — are not things 
without function or property. They tend to assume forms, and in 
those forms to acquire new powers. The universe exists, and we 



l6 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 

exist. To say that it exists, because God willed it so, is to say 
nothing. God is only a name for our ignorance. We conceive of him 
as more perfect than matter, as being the cause of matter, and we 
find no difficulty in making so large an assumption. But it is more 
easy to conceive that matter may exist with less perfect functions, 
than God with entirely perfect functions. 

The earth, when first formed, was fertile, like a woman in her 
youth. She produced freely all kinds of living creatures, and in 
the exuberance of natural fecundity she threw out of herself every 
variety of combination which could consist with the nature of 
things. She produced plants, she produced animals ; some strong, 
some weak, some with power to propagate their species in their 
own likeness, some without that power, some able to support 
themselves with ease, others with difficulty or not at all. Infinite 
varieties of living things were thus brought into existence to take 
their chance of continuance. The most vigorous survived. Lions 
were preserved by their fierceness and strength, foxes by their cun- 
ning, stags by swiftness of foot, man by superior intelligence, and 
other animals again by man's help, because he found them useful 
to him, as dogs and horses, sheep and oxen. While assigning to the 
earth these vast powers of productiveness, Lucretius, nevertheless, 
limits those powers with curious caution. The earth could create 
only beings consistent with themselves. Rivers could not be made 
to run with gold. Trees must bear fruit, not sapphires and emer- 
alds. Horses might be made of many kinds, and men of many 
kinds ; but Centaurs, half horse and half man, could not be made, 
because a horse grows to maturity with five times the rapidity with 
which a man can grow. 

The readers of Darwin will miss the theory of the modification of 
species, which it was impossible for Lucretius to have guessed ; but 
they will find nowhere the modern doctrine of the survival of the 
fittest stated more clearly and carefully. Those who deny most 
earnestly that any elemental power of spontaneous generation can 
be traced in operation at present, are less confident that it may 
not have existed under earlier conditions of this planet, or may 
not exist at present in other planets. The theory of Lucretius is 
not in the least more extravagant than the suggestion of Sir Wil- 
liam Thompson that the first living germ was inttroduced by an 
aerolite. 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY— ANCIENT AND 

MODERN. 

CHAPTER II. 

The Stoics, like the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises, had 
pressed science into the service of religion by the theory of final 
causes. They had examined the eye, and had found an organ con- 
structed curiously to enable us to see. So the ear seemed to be made 
to hear, the feet to walk, the hands to minister to our various neces- 
sities. In the whole system of nature they had found an extraor- 
dinary adaptation of means to special ends, and the universe, as they 
supposed, was generally subordinated to the interests of man. 

From the evidence of contrivance they had passed to a contriv- 
ing mind, and had built together a specious fabric of natural the- 
ology. Lucretius met the Stoics on their own ground, and antici- 
pated precisely the modern objection to the same positions. The 
argument creates more difficulties than it removes ; for if we are to 
suppose every thing which exists to have been designed, we have to 
account for the existence of evil, while scientifically the inference 
of intention confounds organization with mechanism. In machinery 
the instrument is manufactured to supply a need which has been 
felt already. Men dug the ground with their hands before they in- 
vented spades, and they used spades before they invented plows. 
They made plows to do the work more easily which they were 
already doing with inferior means. They fought before they used 
shields and lances ; they slept on the ground before they had beds ; 
and they ate and drank before they had dishes and drinking-cups. 
In the organized works of nature the process is reversed. The use 
does not produce the instrument, but the instrument occasions the 
use. We see because we have eyes, we speak because we have 
tongues of a peculiar form, we hear because we have ears. But with- 
out eyes there could be no sight, without tongues there could be no 
articulation, there would be no sound if there were not ears to 



l8 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 

hear. We are too feeble and too ignorant to place ourselves be- 
hind the purposes of the Maker of the universe and insist that he 
intended this and that. We do not know what he intended. We 
see only that he does not work as we work, and if we insist on evi- 
dence of conscious design, we make the moral phenomena of human 
experience hopelessly inexplicable. Organization is not contrivance, 
but immeasurably superior to contrivance. What it is we can not 
tell. We see only that the organs which we so much admire do not 
come into existence complete, as we should expect to find them if 
they were made with a determinate purpose. They are developed 
slowly, age after age, in successive modifications of a single type, 
the fish's fin becoming the wing of a bird, or the arm and hand of a 
man, the fish's scales becoming the bird's feathers ; the horse's hoof 
a variation of the finger nail. 

Having launched man into the world, Lucretius traces his history 
along the lines of the modern palaeontologist. Sir John Lubbock 
might have transcribed many passages from him without altering a 
word. He describes the unclothed, houseless biped, hiding help- 
lessly in caves, in danger of carnivorous beasts, and poorly feeding 
himself on roots and leaves. A branch of a tree provides him with a 
club and pebbles are his first missiles. The stone age follows. He 
tears the ground with flints. He rises to bows and arrows. 
He kills animals and clothes himself with their skins. He sees 
sparks fly, and learns partly by accident the use of fire. He warms 
his lodging with it and dresses his food. A forest breaks into flame 
on a mountain-side. Straying afterward among the ashes of the 
conflagration, he finds copper ore which had cropped above the sur- 
face smelted by the heat. He examines it, he heats it again and 
finds it soft and malleable, and when cold once more he discovers it 
to be hard as stone and available for a thousand uses. The copper 
age succeeds the stone age, and the iron the copper, and so on 
through all the epochs of mechanical discovery. The neces- 
sities of his body being provided for, the mind begins to work. 
The man opens his eyes to the wonder of what is around him. He 
has done much for himself. But forces are at work about him and 
within him, before which he is helpless. Pains rack his bones, dis- 
ease lays him prostrate and powerless. Tempests destroy his crops. 
Floods sweep away his homestead and his stock. The thunder 
rolls, the levin bolt shoots from the cloud. The earth shakes, the 
meteor blazes across the sky. The sunrise and sunset do not strike 
him with wonder. He has been accustomed to them from his birth 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. I9 

and he knows that if the sun disappears, he will find it again when 
he wakes from his slumber.' 

But what the sun was, or what the moon, or what the bright 
procession of glittering gems which on cloudless nights passed over 
the vault of the sphere in majestic calm, what these were who could 
tell? The largest and brightest of these orbs moved among the 
stars, on courses of their own, perhaps with life, with motion, with 
motives, with will and purposes of their own. The clouds, too, 
the fierce harbingers of storm and desolation, what were they? 
Awe-stricken men called them gods, or the work of gods, with 
passions like those of man. They bent before them with trembling 
deprecation of their wrath. They invented religion, and in so doing 
filled themselves with causeless terrors which banished peace from 
their waking thoughts and filled their dreams with phantoms. 
But their misgivings were not to haunt them forever, 

Ignorantia causarum conferre Deorum 

Cogit ad Imperium res et concedere Regnum. 

With knowledge of the causes of things, the dominion disappeared 
of these imagined beings. Nature, when examined reverently, 
showed no caprice, no sign of interference or passion or willfulness ; 
one unchanging sequence of natural cause and natural effect pre- 
vailed throughout the universe. Each phenomenon was preceded 
by some natural force producing it, and each advance of science 
was a guarantee to men of security and happiness. Miserable man 
was, and miserable he would be, so long as he was haunted by the 
dread of the unknown ; not that the gods themselves, whatever 
they might be, inflicted pain on any inferior creatures ; the gods were 
blessed in themselves and paid no heed to mortals. But wretched 
mortals tortured their own souls by causeless fear and terror. Thun- 

* It would seem true that, what we call the " solar myth" had been already sug- 
gested as an explanation of the current legends ; but the theory found no favor with 
Lucretius, who dismisses it in a few lines as sensible as they are beautiful. 

" Nee plangorc diem magno, solemque per agros 
Quoerebant pavidi palantes noctis in Umbris, 
Sed taciti respectabant somnoque sepulti, 
Dum rosea face sol inferret lumina ccelo. 
A parvis quod enim consuerunt cernere semper 
Alterno tenebras et lucem tempore gigni 
Non erat ut fieri posset mirarier unquam, 
Nee diffidere ne terras eterna teneret, 
Nox in perpetuum detracto lumine solis." — De Rerum N'aturA, lib. v. 



20 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 

der and lightning were the chief strongholds of superstition. Horace, 
we remember, professed to have been converted by a thunderstorm. 
Lucretius, though his knowledge fell far short of ours, was still satis- 
fied that these aerial disturbances were natural phenomena. There 
was never thunder from a clear sky. Clouds accompanied it always, 
and clouds of a peculiar character. Could it be believed that the 
Olympian Jove came down into a cloud to be nearer to his mark ? If 
the thunder was his voice, he would warn before he struck ; but 
the flash always came before the sound. If the lightning struck the 
wicked, some sign of purpose might be admitted, 

*' icti flammus ut fulguris halent, 
Pectore perfixo documen mortalibus acre." 

But these fiery missiles fall on the innocent and the evil alike. 
They fall on the shrines of the gods themselves as readily as on 
the palaces of tyrants. Most often they fall on the earth or into 
the sea. Were we to suppose that the Omnipotent was practic- 
ing his hand ? Lucretius did not know the phenomena of electricity. 
But with intuitive genius he had anticipated two, at least, of our 
most important modern discoveries. He had perceived that force 
was a constant quantity, that it was not expended, but was converted 
from one form into another. He had ascertained, also, that heat and 
light were intimately connected with force. A blow produced heat; 
sparks flew when steel was struck with flint ; lead would melt by 
friction, even by the friction of the air when passing swiftly through 
it. His editor, Creech, selects this particular theory as an illustration 
of his scientific credulity. Lucretius had in fact struck on the 
exact explanation of the incandescence of meteoric stones. 

From thunderstorms Lucretius passed to the other aerial pheno- 
menon of rain. Rain was credited to Jupiter Pluvius, or whoever it 
might be. Lucretius showed, with ingenious clearness, that rain did 
not descend from any reservoir of waters above the firmament. It 
descended because it had first ascended by evaporation ; moisture 
rose from the sea, rose from the ground, rose whenever any wet thing 
became dry. In the sky it condensed into clouds, from which it fell 
again in rain. 

So going one by one, through the chief strongholds to which super- 
stition attached itself, the Epicurean poet insisted, and as we all now 
admit, insisted truly, that every one of them could be traced to 
natural causes acting in a definite way, and that there was no sign 
anywhere of miraculous interposition. 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 21 

Of this universal system man was a part, but not the chief part, 
as in his vanity he imagined. Nature, in her work of generation, had 
no special thought of man. above her other children ; she had placed 
him on the earth, a being who, if he could control his passion and im- 
agination, if he could labor quietly and enjoy the fruit of his labor, 
was capable of modest happiness, and was equally certain of misery 
if he gave way to wild ambitions or disordered appetites. Society 
formed naturally, and regulations were made for the good of all, to 
enable society to hold together. If man would submit to these regu- 
lations, and would fulfill such functions of labor as fell to him, he 
might live out the space of years which nature had allotted to him in 
peace and content. His allotted time being over, then comes the end. 
And what is the end ? From such a philosophy there could come but 
one answer. Lucretius is only peculiar in this, that the answer which 
he gives has no note of sadness in it, but is proclaimed as a message 
of good news, a deliverance from groundless alarms. The future life 
which haunted the consciences of the early nations was an antiicpa- 
tion of torment. So far from being any check on vice, Lucretius in- 
sisted that it was a provocation to crime by adding new terrors to 
death. The enormities into which men were seen daily plunging 
were adventured only to escape want and poverty, and want and 
poverty were dreadful because they were avenues to death. But 
death rightly looked on was no fearful thing, scarcely a thing to be 
regretted. What was death ? The separation of soul and body. 
And what was soul ? When a child was conceived did some im- 
mortal spirit come racing through the sky to take possession of the 
growing germ ? Not so at all. Soul was generated with body and 
corresponded to body. In the human body there was a human 
soul. In an animal body there was an animal soul. A horse had 
not the mind of a man, nor a man the mind of a horse. The soul 
was born with the body, and grew with its growth. Feeble, like its 
tenement, in infancy, it strengthened as the body strengthened, came 
to its maturity when the youth became a man, and with the coming 
on of age mind and limbs lost their power together. 

Whatever might be the nature of the soul, it was inseparably con- 
nected with an organized system of matter, and could have no exist- 
ence independent of it. The human soul and the animal soul were 
the same in kind, they differed only as their bodies differed, and 
resembled each other in the same proportion. At death the soul 
of both dissolved like smoke, and ceased to be. 

" Ergo dissolvi quoque convenit omnem animai, 
Naturam ceu fumus in altas afe'ris auras." 



22 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 

In a human body, and nowhere else, could a human soul have 
existence. Clouds did not form in the sea. Fish did not swim on 
dry land. Blood did not flow in a flower-stalk, or sap in stones. 
To every thing there was an allotted place. The mortal had no fel- 
lowship with the immortal. 

Was this a sad conclusion ? " Rather," says Lucretius, " it is the 
most consoling of certainties. Death is nothing, for where death is 
we are not. Before we were begotten empires were convulsed ; 
provinces were wasted with fire and sword ; nations were sunk in 
wretchedness. We knew nothing of these calamities. They touched 
not us. We could suffer nothing, for we were not. As it was be- 
fore we began to live, so it will be again when we have ceased to 
live. Storms may roll over the earth, land may be mixed with sea, 
and sea with sky. We shall know nothing of it. The substance of 
our bodies will be in other forms, with other souls attached to them. 
New beings will have come into existence, to live and pass away as 
we did. But those beings will not be us. The continuity once broken 
is broken forever. We shudder when we look upon a corpse. We 
imagine that when our bodies are corrupting, we shall be in some 
way present and conscious of our own decay. It is not so. Our 
bodies will decay, but we shall not be present. We shall not be any 
more. We shall not suffer any more. *' Ah !" some one says, 
" must I leave my wife and children, and my pleasant home ? Must 
all be taken from me?" They will not be taken from you, iox you 
will have no being. You will not miss them. You will know no 
regrets or vain longings for what is gone. Your friends will lament 
for you. You will not lament for them. You will be in peace. 

"Why, then, unhappy mortal," says Lucretius to the vain com 
plainers, "why do you grieve? Why cry out on death ? Has your 
life been happy, the banquet is over; you have taken your fill; 
depart and be thankful. Have you been unfortunate, has life 
brought you sorrow and pain, why wish for more of it ? Life and 
sorrow end together. Would you live forever? The terms of 
human existence do not alter. Had you a thousand lives they could 
bring you nothing new. You would but tread again the same circle. 
As it has been with you, so it would be, though you could repeat 
the process to eternity. This is nature's sentence, and who shall 
gainsay her? Dry your tears. Peace with your idle whines. Use 
your time wisely while it is yours. A little space and it will be gone. 
The ages before you were born are a mirror in which you can read 
the ages to come. The past has no terrors in it. The future has 



SCIENCE AND TIIEOLOGY 



23 



none, unless you create them for yourself. Real indeed they are to 
you as long as you anticipate them. Tityus and Sisyphus, Cerbe- 
rus and the furies ! the thought of these will cause you agonies as 
long as you believe in them. Know these spectres for what they are, 
the offspring of your own fears, and be at rest. Who and what are 
you that you dream of immortality? Wiser and nobler men than 
you will ever be have lived, and are gone. Accept your fate. 
There is no remedy." 

Such was the Lucretian creed, which has this merit in it, that it 
is free from cant. There is no half belief here ; no affectation ; no 
professions from the teeth outward, of what the heart disowns ; no 
feeble struggling to reconcile the irreconcilable ; no half-formed mis- 
givings, which take from our actions their pith and marrow, and 
make us dread to look into our consciences for fear of what we may 
find there. It was a creed naturally accepted by resolute men who 
were too proud to play intellectual tricks with themselves, and in it 
is expressed completely the practical genius of the Roman empire. 
The multitude never adopted it. The multitude continued their 
offerings at the temple, consulted the oracles, and prayed, or affect- 
ed to pray, to the gods. The State did not openly profess it. The 
State maintained scrupulously the established decencies and 
ceremonials, but it was the real conviction of the Roman intellect. 
It was the creed of Julius Caesar. It was the creed at heart of Cicero. 
Tacitus would not have called himself an Epicurean, but his opinion 
was substantially the same. Above all, it was a confession of the 
faith on which for four centuries the civilized world was ruled. The 
Romans knew nothing and cared nothing for spiritual ideals. Peace, 
order, justice between man and man, and material prosperity, these 
were the sole aims of the Roman administration, and the expla- 
nation of their contemptuous toleration of the motley superstitions 
of the age. 

Nations have never been formed on such principles. Nations in 
their infancy aspire to something else than material prosperity. 
They have beliefs, enthusiasms, patriotisms, with a savor of noble- 
ness in them. Caesar himself owed his conquests to the self-devo- 
tion of his soldiers, his own affection for them, and to his inconsis- 
tent idealism. And the experiment of the Roman empire showed 
that nations can not any more live by such principles after they have 
arrived at maturity. Coarse minds are brutalized by them. The 
average mind rejects them, and prefers superstition, however wild. 
Gibbon considered that, on the whole, the subjects of the empire 



24 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 

enjoyed greater happiness in the years which intervened between 
the accession of Trajan and the death of Marcus Aurelius than at 
any period before or since ; but it was a happiness in which their 
nature became degraded, and when the shock came of the barba- 
rian invasions they had lost the courage to resist. 

It would of course be preposterous to pretend that there was any 
general resemblance between the state of things under the Roman 
sovereignty and the present condition of Europe and America. Then 
the whole civilized world was held down under a single despotism. 
Now free and powerful nations confront each other, each jealous of 
its rights, and resolute to maintain them ; each professing to prefer 
honor to prosperity. And yet in the long run the fate of nations is 
determined by the convictions about the nature and responsibilities 
of man which are embodied in their policy, and are entertained by 
the ablest thinkers ; and every where, it may be said, opinions are 
now professed by men whom we agree to admire, and are accepted 
by politicians as the rule of legislation, which recall the phenomena of 
the time when the old order of things perished, as if high cultivation 
itself was like the blossoming of a plant, the final consummation of a 
long series of past efforts which precedes a great change. The 
flower sheds its petals. Seed-vessels develop in the place of it, from 
which after a long winter there arises a new era. 

The nations of modern Europe, like the early Greeks and Romans, 
formed their original policy on religion. For centuries states and indi- 
viduals alike professed to be governed in all that they thought and 
did by the supposed revelation which was given to mankind eigh- 
teen hundred years ago. Avowed disbelief of it there was none ; 
of secret, silent misgiving there was probably very little. For prac- 
tical purposes that revelation was accepted as a fact, as little allow- 
ing of doubt as the commonest phenomena of daily experience. 
The universal confidence received its first shock at the Reformation 
of the sixteenth century. Just as the original pagan creed was 
made incredible by the legends with which it was overspread, so 
Christianity was overgrown by a forest of extravagant superstitions. 
Conscience and intelligence rose in revolt, and tore them to pieces. 
For a time all was well. The weeds were gone ; the faith of the 
early church was restored in its simplicity. The Huguenots in 
France, the Lutherans in Germany, the Puritans in England and 
Scotland were as absolutely under the influence of religious belief 
as the apostles and first converts. Providence to them was not a 
form of speech, but a living reality. The preambles of the English 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 25 

Acts of Parliament referred always to the will of the Almighty as 
the foundation of human law. Skeptics even then had begun to 
exist. There were men who, after the authority of the Church had 
been shaken, had not acquiesced in the authority of a book ; and 
philosophy commenced its search for other grounds of certainty ; 
just as it commenced in Greece before ordinary men had begun 
consciously to disbelieve in Paganism. But in neither instance 
had these first efforts any wide effect. The time was not ripe for 
Democritus ; it was not ripe for Hobbes or Spinoza. In an age 
when the massive intellect of Cromwell was satisfied with Protest- 
ant Christianity, and hungry village congregations could demand a 
second hour from their preachers, philosophy might speculate in 
its closet, but it could not affect popular sentiment. The disin- 
tegrating forces, however, worked on below the surface. Puritan- 
ism and its ways went out of fashion. The austere virtues of the 
Commonwealth were followed by folly and dissipation, and free 
thought again raised its head. A new and enlightened genera- 
tion turned with shame and penitence from a piety which sent 
wretched old women to the stake for crimes which had no exist- 
ence save in the diseased brain of cowardly fanatics. Disbelief 
in any present exercise of supernatural power extended backward 
upon the past. The mythologies, the oracles, the auguries of the 
old world came to be regarded as dreams. The miracles of the 
medieval church were dismissed as forgery and illusion, and the 
cures still alleged to be worked at the shrines of Catholic saints 
were used as an argument, being admitted to be false, to show how 
these legendary stories had passed into belief. The Old and New 
Testament resisted longer the dissolving influence. They were 
protected by the enchantment which still surrounded the accredited 
records of revelation, and the history of the chosen people was looked 
on as exceptional and special. But a charm, however sacred, could 
not long repel the restless efforts of the speculative intellect. If 
miracles were so inherently improbable that we were entitled to 
reject without examination every alleged instance of contemporary 
supernatural interposition, on what ground could we draw a line so 
rigid between sacred and profane history ? The lives of the saints 
were as full of marvels as the Book of Kings or the Acts of the 
Apostles ; why were we to disbelieve every story which lent support 
to a religion which we did not like, while we insisted on the absolute 
truth of each single detail which we found in the Bible ? Revelation, 
it was said, was itself a miracle ; the divinely authenticated author- 



26 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 

ity for a miraculous history. Such an answer was a tacit concession 
that a miracle could not be substantiated by human evidence. The 
spirit of Democritus had revived in Epicurus; the spirit of Hobbes 
revived in Hume. The Essay on Miracles threw into words a con- 
viction which had been already formed in every logical mind in 
Europe. If the supernatural was to be admitted any longer, it must 
be received by faith ; it could not be proved by reason. So far as 
philosophy had a word to say about the matter, the theological posi- 
tion had been taken by storm. Hume's arguments were desperately 
resisted, as it was natural that they should be. Ingenious attempts 
were made to recover the captured lines, but the conclusions de- 
manded were too weighty for the premises. No human skill could 
make it probable on grounds of reason that while profane history 
was full of fiction and mistakes, every incident and every word 
should have been recorded exactly in sacred history. Such a his- 
tory would be itself the greatest of miracles ; and to assume a mir- 
aculous book was an act of faith, as Hume said, and it could be 
notjiing else. 

In the last century there were no penny newspapers carrying 
over the world the newest discoveries, with leading articles and 
criticisms addressed to the million. Philosophic writings had a 
small and select circulation, and the million continued to think as 
their fathers had thought. If we can beheve Berkeley and Butler, 
however, their most accomplished lay contemporaries had ceased 
to believe in Christianity as completely as Pericles and Alcibiades 
had ceased to believe in Jupiter ; and had the political condition of 
the v/orld remained undisturbed, the doubt would have probably 
extended downward, and the state of opinion at which we have at 
present arrived might have been anticipated by half a century. But 
the growth of liberalism on the Continent had been swifter than with 
us. The catastrophe of the French Revolution, with the enthrone- 
ment of the Goddess of Reason, appeared as the visible fruit of infi- 
delity. The» English mind was terrified back out of its uncertain- 
ties, and determined, reason or no reason, that it would not have 
the Bible called in question. It was decided that Hume had been 
sufficiently answered by Lardner and Paley. , The discussion was 
not to be reopened ; and English middle life returned for nearly 
half a century to the fixed convictions of earlier times. 

Behind the banner thus resolutely raised came an effort to restore 
the influence of religion on the heart and emotions. First there was 
a prominent revival of evangelical piety. As the wave of spiritual 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 



27 



feeling lost its force, it has been succeeded by superstition and by 
a less sincere and simple, but still ardent appeal to tradition and 
Catholic principles. The leaky vessel has not been repaired, for 
repairs were impossible, but the chinks and flaws in her planking 
have been tarred over and painted. Stained windows have gone 
back into the churches, and the white light which sufficed for the 
simple, truth-loving Protestants have been replaced by the enervat- 
ing tints so dear to the devotional soul. Organs and choristers, 
altars and altar ornaments, fine clothes and processions, the mystery 
of the real presence, in the name of which more crimes have been 
perpetrated in Europe than can be laid to the charge of the bloody 
idol in Tauris — we have them even now among us in full activity. 
The religious mind has set itself with all its might to make things 
seem what they are not, and turn back the river of destiny to its 
sacred fountains. 

In vain. Practical life has meanwhile gone its way. The 
principles of the once abhorred French Revolution have been 
adopted as the rule of political action, even in conservative Eng 
land ; and silently, without noise or opposition, we have taken 
Jeremy Bentham for our practical prophet, and have admitted as 
completely as was admitted by Augustus Caesar, or Trajan, that civil 
government has no object beyond the material welfare of the peo- 
ple. The will of God has no more a place, even by courtesy, in our 
modern statutes. Political economy is the creed which governs the 
actions of public men ; and political economy, by claiming to be an 
interpretation of a law of nature, dispenses with Providence, while 
it assumes as an axiom that the masses of men are, have been, and 
ever will be influenced by nothing else than a consideration of mate- 
rial interest. Eccentric individuals may have their generosities, their 
pieties, their tastes for art or science or amusement. Interest is 
the one constant commanding motive on which the practical states- 
man can rely. Respectable people fight against the unwelcome 
truth when it is thrust upon them inconveniently. They believe 
in political economy, and they believe that they believe in Chris- 
tianity. Naively and unconsciously they betray their true convic- 
tions in the language which they habitually use. When the 
English Liturgy was written, " wcaltJi' meant well-being. Well- 
being is now money. Ask what a man is worth, the answer is 
his rent-roll. Has he been fortunate? He has made a good 
speculation, or he has inherited a '' legacy " when he did not 
expect it. Is the nation " prosperous '? Where should we look 



28 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 

but to the rate of wages and the imports and exports ? Are we in 
an age of progress? The income-tax decides. The standard of 
human value has become again what it was under the Caesars, and 
which Christianity came into the world to declare that it was not. 
People continue to go to church. They continued then to go to 
the temples. They say their prayers in public, or perhaps in 
private. So they did then. The clergy pray for rain or fine weather, 
and on great occasions, such as the potato blight, the archbishop 
issues a special form of petition for its removal. But the clergy 
and the archbishop are aware all the time that the evils which they 
pray against depend on natural causes, and that a prayer from a 
Christian minister will as little bring a change of weather as the 
incantation of a Caffre rain-maker. We keep to conventional forms, 
because none of us likes to acknowledge what we all know to be 
true ; but we do not believe ; we do not even believe that we 
believe, the bishops themselves no more than the rest of us ; no 
more than the College of Augurs in Cato's time believed in the 
sacred chickens. 

An energetic people are impatient of insincerity, and the con- 
victions which we all act upon have at last found a voice precisely 
as convictions of an analogous kind found a voice in Lucretius. 
We have practically eliminated Providence from the administration 
of things. The Lucretian philosophy has revived again, reinforced 
by a vast accumulation of new knowledge, to tell us, as Lucretius 
did, that the universe can be accounted for without the hypothesis 
of a Providence. The theory of development, as it is called, does not 
deny the existence of God any more than Epicureanism denied 
it. It denies only that the phenomena require the existence of 
such a being to account for them. For a time, even after the 
authority of tradition was shaken, science seemed to be on the 
side of religion. The evidence of design in nature was urged, as it 
was urged by the Stoics, in proof of a designing mind ; and as long 
as each species of plant and animal was believed to be distinct from 
every other, each one of them required a special art of creation to 
bring it into being. Both positions are now abandoned by advanced 
scientific thinkers. Lucretius' objections are again held to be fatal 
to ** final causes." If the " omnia ex ovo" is not an acknowledged 
certainty, if we are not yet agreed that we are all descended from a 
jelly-fish, yet every naturalist of consequence is convinced that the 
phenomena of life are produced on constant and uniformly acting 
principles of law ; that the history of the animal creation is a his- 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 29 

tory of progressive growth, lower forms being succeeded by higher, 
as the foetus in the womb develops into a man, without any sign 
of the action of any external energizing powers. 

Moral and historical philosophy have modeled themselves on 
the same type. Moral philosophy, based on the necessities of society 
and general expediency, needs no God or voice of God, in the con- 
science, to explain its principles, while the admitted facts that the 
character of a man depends on his organic tendencies, affected by 
education and circumstances, have modified, in spite of us, our 
notions of free-will and our definition of moral responsibility. In 
history, again, ingenious writers discover laws of evolution, causes 
operating through centuries, determining the characteristics of 
successive epochs, exhibiting individuals as the plaything of 
broad and general forces, and reducing still further the limits 
within which they can be the authors of their own actions. 
Unchanged in principle, the Lucretian interpretation of life 
and its conditions is passing swiftly into general acceptance. 
And now arises the serious question how far these notions 
will go, and how they will affect such spiritual belief as we 
still continue to hold? The theory of development may be 
held, and is held, by many persons who look forward to a 
life beyond the grave. Can this expectation any longer allege a 
rational ground for itself, or is it a plant which grew in another 
soil, and lingers now as an exotic in a climate with which it has no 
natural affinity? Time will show; but meanwhile we may learn 
something from the history of the past. In the Rome of the 
Empire, religion had less to say for itself than it has now, and 
science relatively had far greater advantage over it. The print 
which has been left by Christianity on the character of mankind is 
too deep to be effaced or disregarded. Yet even in the Roman 
Empire, the sciences which mastered the intellect could not master 
the emotion, and there is an insight of emotion which the intellect 
can not explain, but which nevertheless does and will exercise an 
influence which can not be ignored ; and there are virtues necessary 
to human society which will only grow when emotion is allowed to 
speak. 

The educated Romans had satisfied themselves that there was 
no hereafter ; that Tartarus was a dream, and that at death they 
faded into smoke. They could discourse eloquently on the good 
and the beautiful. They could enforce order by the policeman. 
They could develop useful arts. They could cultivate science and 



30 SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 

material progress. They could create the condition, in fact, which 
was so impressive to the mind of Gibbon. But morality and purity 
and charity, patriotism, enthusiasm, even art and poetry, withered 
under a creed which deprived life of its human interest and the 
imagination of every object which could kindle it. Very remark- 
ably, even among statesmen like Celsus, who still held to the scien- 
tific formula of things, a belief in a future life and future retribu- 
tion made its way once more against the wind into the position of 
an admitted truth. The better sort of men clung vaguely to the 
moral principles of religion ; and when paganism was fairly dead, 
all that had been true in paganism, a belief in God, a belief that 
the world after all was not deserted by a moral government, that 
our earthly life is but the threshold of our true existence, all this 
revived in Christianity. Centuries passed before the transformation 
was complete, centuries of miserable retribution for the long pur- 
suit of a godless, material prosperity. The civilized animals (for 
animals only they had proclaimed themselves to be) were awakened 
roughly from their dreams by the fierce inrush of the " Scourge of 
God" out of the northern forests. 

Man's nature is the same as it always was. Science has much 
to teach us, but its message is not the last nor the highest. If we 
may infer the future from the past, a time will come when we shall 
cease to be dazzled with the thing which we call progress, when 
increasing " wealth" will cease to satisfy, nay, may be found inca- 
pable of being produced or preserved except when relegated to a 
secondary place, when the illusions which have strangled religion 
shall be burnt away and the immortal part of it restored to its right- 
ful sovereignty. A long weary road may lie before us. Not easily 
will an inviolable atmosphere of reverence form again round spirit 
ual faith to warn off the insolent intruder. Piety, reverence, hum- 
ble adoration of the great Maker of the world, are in themselves so 
beautiful that religious f^aith might have remained forever behind that 
enchanted shield, if imaginative devotion could have kept within 
bounds its wild demands upon the reason. Not till Catholics had 
piled superstition on superstition, not till Protestants had elabo- 
rated a speculative theology which conscience as well as intellect at 
length flung from it as incredible, did the angels which guarded the 
shrine fold their wings and fly. The garden of Eden is desecrated now 
by the trampling of controversy, and no ingenious reconciliations of 
religion and science, no rivers of casuistic holy water, can restore 
the ruined lovehness of traditionary faith. But the truth which is 



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 3I 

in religion will assert itself again as it asserted itself before. A 
society without God in the heart of it is not permitted to exist ; 
and when once more a spiritual creed has established itself which 
men can act on in their lives, and believe with their whole souls, it 
is to be hoped that they will have grown wiser by experience, 
and will not again leave the most precious of their possessions to 
be ruined by the extravagances of exaggerating credulity. 

James Anthony Froude. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE REPLY TO MR. FROUDE, 

By professor P. G. TAIT. 



DOES HUMANITY REQUIRE A NEW 
REVELATION?^ 

THIS question we answer with a prompt and decided — No ! 
Let us briefly consider : 

1. How it has recently been raised. 

2. By what arguments and analogies an affirmative answer has 
been supported. 

3. Why there is no necessity for a new revelation. 

We will not formally take up these as separate heads, but merely 
use them as a sort of framework for our discourse. 

^ ' W/ia( is generally doubted is doubtful. ' ' 

So at least says Mr. Froude, with charming dogmatism, in his 
extremely well-written articles in recent numbers of this Review.* 
This paradox is in fact one of the two chief reasons which he gives 
for looking upon the Christian religion as a scheme which suited its 
time, no doubt, but which now requires to be superseded. I can 
not attempt to compete with him in word-painting, nor should I 
desire to use it, even if I could, in place of argument. Thus, 
instead of commenting on this statement of his, for the moment at 
least, I try to imagine how one would fare at Mr. Froude's hands 
if he took a somewhat similar — though perhaps not equally startling 
— license. Suppose, for instance, a writer of acknowledged power 
were to lay down as a matter of undisputed certainty a proposition 
such as this : 

What is generally misunderstood is unintelligible. 

* " Science and Theology — Ancient and Modern." — From the International Review. 



DOES HUMANITY REQUIRE 33 

With what howls of execration, with what withering sarcasm 
would such a writer be welcomed — according to the style and 
temper of the multitudinous and mutually incompatible schools of 
thinkers, to every one of whom he would have given mortal 
offense ? I can not conjecture what exact form of denunciation 
would be employed by Mr. Froude ; but it would assuredly be 
something tremendous. Yet I venture to assert that this proposi- 
tion contains quite as much of essential truth as does that laid down 
by Mr. Froude. 

Fancy the theorist in politics or in political economy who has 
for years endeavored to bring his universal panacea before a listless 
public, and whose sole reward has been some contemptuously sarcas- 
tic notices, of a few lines each, in the more obscure of the daily 
journals — not one of the writers having taken the trouble to master 
what he was criticising. Is this great theorist necessarily unintel- 
ligible because everywhere misunderstood ? 

Fancy, again, the modern poet who should say his lyrics were 
misunderstood, because generally regarded as delirious and more 
than obscene: — while to himself, the true and only judge, they were 
merely the voice of Nature speaking by his pen; — would Jie allow 
that the genuine reason is that his verses are unintelligible ? 

Such men might not make out their case, though they would be 
hard to convince that they were in the wrong. But when a scien- 
tific man appears on the field, he tells you at once that there is no 
such thing in mathematical or physical science as the Unintelligible, 
though there is much that is imperfectly, or not at all, understood. 

Or, to take higher game, let us consider Mr. Froude himself. 

Is the term Force unintelligible because all but universally mis- 
understood and misapplied, so far, indeed, as to be generally con- 
founded with Energy? Mr. Froude says that Lucretius, "with 
intuitive genius, had anticipated two, at least, of our most impor- 
tant modern discoveries. He had perceived that force was a con- 
stant quantity, that it was not expended, but was converted from 
one form to another." 

Of course what is here referred to is the Conservation of Energy ; 
but, though so generally misunderstood, the principle itself is by no 
means unintelligible. Yet the error here committed is, from the 
scientific point of view, so great as of itself seriously to shake our 
confidence in the rest of the article of which it forms a part. While 
engaged with this branch of the subject, and to avoid repetition, I 
may allude, once for all, to a little more of Mr. Froude's unscientific 



34 A NEW REVELATION? 

science. Thus he applauds the methods of Lucretius, and says his 
moral and spiritual conclusions agree with those of the best modern 
scientific thinkers. We shall presently have to ask, Who are the 
best modern scientific thinkers ? and the answer will promptly and 
effectually dispose of Mr. Froude's notion that their moral and 
spiritual conclusions agree with those of Lucretius. 

Again, Mr. Froude says, after sketching the cosmogony of 
Lucretius : 

** The reader of Darwin will miss the theory of the modification of species, which 
it was impossible for Lucretius to have guessed ; but they will find nowhere the 
modern doctrine of the survival of the fittest stated more clearly and carefully. 
Those who deny most earnestly that any elemental power of spontaneous genera- 
tion can be traced in operation at present, are less confident that it may not have 
existed under earlier conditions of this planet, or may not exist at present in other 
planets. The theory of Lucretius is not in the least more extravagant than the 
suggestion of Sir William Thompson that the first living germ was introduced 
by an aerolite." 

This passage contains a tangled mass of error, for the discussion 
of which the space at my disposal would be wholly insufificient. 
Not to speak of the adventitious p in Thompson, nor of the 
ridiculous superlative in the phrase '' survival of the fittest'' (which 
is not Mr. Froude's, but which it is strange to see used without 
protest by an accurate writer), the statement about the opponents 
of spontaneous generation is as wholly incorrect as is the allusion to 
the meteorite theory of Helmholtz and Thomson. 

Take another general proposition, quite as defensible as Mr. 
Froude's : 

He who is generally trusted is trustworthy. 

I should think Mr. Froude's vast historical knowledge would 
make him one of the very first to cry out against a statement such 
as this. Every one of us, in his own personal experience of 
bankers, railway directors, insurance officers, and what not, has had 
ample reason to know and feel its absolute falsity. 

After what has just been said, it is hardly necessary to examine 
or comment upon the other dogmatic statements of Mr. Froude, 
such as 

*' Truth is what men trow" 
" Things are what men think J* 

As contributions to English etymology, these may or may not be 
accurate. With that I have nothing to do. But as logical propo- 
sitions — and it is as such that they are brought forward and used — 



DOES HUMANITY REQUIRE 35 

they arc transparently Incorrect. Yet these and their like form one 
half of the basis of Mr. Froude's slashing but melancholy argu- 
ment. Let us for a moment suppose them cut away, as at least 
useless if not wholly misleading, and endeavor to discover what 
support remains. 
Here it is : 

"The theory of development, as it is called, does not deny the existence of 
God any more than Epicureanism denied it. It denies only that the phenomena 
require the existence of such a being to account for them. For a time, even after 
the authority of tradition was shaken, science seemed to be on the side of reHg- 
ion. The evidence of design in nature was urged, as it was urged by the Stoics, 
in proof of a designing mind ; and as long as each species of plant and animal 
was believed to be distinct from every other, each one of them required a special 
act of creation to bring it into being. Both positions are now abandoned by 
advanced scientific thinkers." 

If this be so, it is no doubt a very sad state of things, and per- 
haps might explain the following very extraordinary assertion with 
reference to the present time as compared with that of the 
Caesars : 

*' People continue to go to church. They continued then to go to the temples. 
They say their prayers in public, or perhaps in private. So they did then. The 
clergy pray for rain or fine weather, and on great occasions, such as the potato 
blight, the archbishop issues a special form of petition for it§ removal. But the 
clergy and the archbishop are aware all the time that the evils which they pray 
against depend on natural causes, and that a prayer from a Christian minister will 
as little bring a change of weather as the incantation of a Caffre rain-maker. We 
keep to conventional forms, because none of us likes to acknowledge what we 
all know to be true ; but we do not believe ; we do not even believe that we believe, 
the bishops themselves no more than the rest of us — no more than the College of 
Augurs in Cato's time believed in the sacred chickens." 

I feel assured that there are but few thinking men who will 
indorse a statement like this. So far as it is connected with 
science, it rests upon absolutely no scientific basis whatever ; for 
science has not proved, and will never be able to prove, that there 
are not now any direct interferences (from without) in what we call 
the order of nature. And the assertions as to our beliefs are prob- 
ably even more wide of the mark than those of Elijah, when to his 
querulously-egotistical exclamation, " I have been very jealous for 
the Lord God of Hosts : because the children of Israel have for- 
saken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy proph- 
ets with the sword ; and I, even I only, am left ; and they seek 
my life, to take it away" — the altogether unexpected and crushing 



36 A NEW REVELATION? 

answer came : "Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all 
the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which 
hath not kissed him." 

Perhaps Mr. Froude's answer to this objection may be that sup- 
plied by his own words : " We are too earnest to tolerate impiety, 
and the traditions of religion will retain their hold with the millions 
long after they have lost their influence over the intellect. Intel- 
lect we know is not omniscient. Emotion has a voice in the mat- 
ter, which is always on the side of faith, and women in such sub- 
jects are governed almost wholly by their feelings." 

Still it is not easy to reconcile this statement with the last above 
quoted. 

But who, pray, are the advanced '* scientific thinkers" so con- 
fidently appealed to by Mr. Froude as having given up the proof 
which is furnished by the evidence of design in nature ? 

Mr. Froude says, " the inferences [of Lucretius] were drawn 
in the strictest scientific method. Within the proper limits of phys- 
ical science he anticipated many of the generalizations of the best 
modern scientific thinkers. His moral and spiritual conclusions are 
almost exactly the same as theirs ;" ** the fate of nations is deter- 
mined by the convictions about the nature and responsibilities of 
man which . . . are entertained by the ablest thinkers ; and 
everywhere opinions are now professed by men whom we agree to 
admire, . . . which recall the . . . time when the old 
order of things perished." If these extracts contain even a trace 
of truth, we are indeed in a bad way. Let us examine them. One 
thing is specially to be remarked, the persistence and iteration with 
which Mr. Froude claims as supporters of his views the ablest scien- 
tific thinkers. 

When we ask of any competent authority, who were the 
" advanced," the " best," and the ** ablest" scientific thinkers of 
the immediate past (in Britain), we can not but receive for answer 
such names as Brewster, Faraday, Forbes, Graham, Rowan Hamil- 
ton, Herschel, and Talbot. This must be the case unless we use 
the word science in a perverted sense. Which of these great men 
gave up the idea that nature evidences a designing mind ? 

But perhaps Mr. Froude refers to the advanced thinkers still 
happily alive among us. The names of the foremost among them 
are not far to seek. But, unfortunately for his assertion, it is quite 
certain that Andrews, Joule, Clerk-Maxwell, Balfour Stewart, 
Stokes, William Thomson, and such like, have, each and all of 



DOES HUMANITY REQUIRE 37 

them, when the opportunity presented itself, spoken in a sense 
altogether different from that implied in Mr. Froude's article. 
Surely there are no truly scientific thinkers in Britain farther 
advanced than these ! But then Mr. Froude has said that the 
inferences of Lucretius "were drawn in the strictest scientific 
method." Most scientific men think them, as a rule, metaphysical, 
and even in some instances wholly absurd. 

It is obvious from this that Mr. Froude's notions of science are 
altogether at variance with those of the best authorities. 

For true scientific writing there are three indispensable requi- 
sites : 

1. Your facts must be facts. 

2. Your reasoning must be logical. 

3. Your knowledge must be in all respects adequate. 

The words italicized are of the utmost importance, because the 
very slightest defect of knowledge may be fatal to the whole con- 
clusion. 

Mr. Froude is a very able and plausible writer, and his position 
as a historian is matter of common knowledge. But though these 
qualifications undoubtedly render his essay very pleasant reading, 
the fact that his subject deals to a certain extent with science has 
proved sufificient to show that something more than literary knowl- 
edge and ability is wanted to confer upon it that accuracy which is 
indispensable to authority. Nothing prepares one so well for the 
solution of a hard problem as previous practice at similar but easier 
ones, so we may usefully say a word or two about a few simpler 
cases, which bear some little analogy to that of Mr. Froude, in con- 
nection with his recent articles. 

Nothing is more strikingly characteristic of the ignorance of 
even educated people than the way in which certain persons obtain 
undeserved popularity and come to be regarded (except of course by 
experts) as authorities in literature or in science. The royal road 
to this distinction lies in not merely looking and talking big, but in 
doing so in a great variety of subjects. Lawyers laughed at the 
late Lord Brougham's law, but thought him great in literature and 
science ; scientific men laughed at his science, but allowed that he 
was a master in law and literature ; and the recently published 
Napier correspondence has shown in what hearty contempt he was 
held by literary authorities like Macaulay. 

The once celebrated " Vestiges of Creation" owed its popularity 
not so much to the truth and novelty of some of its statements, and 



38 A NEW REVELATION ? 

their supposed heretical boldness, as to the enormous range of sub- 
jects on which its author could smatter sufficiently to pass muster 
with men who knew them only superficially. Even true scientific 
men, though each convinced that the author was only superficially 
acquainted with his own pet subject, were often incautious enough 
to state that he was obviously well acquainted with every thing else. 

It is a mere truism to say that no one can nowadays write with 
authority on more than two or three branches even of science — and, 
in general, these are closely allied : as physics, chemistry, and min- 
eralogy, anatomy and physiology, etc. And it is another, but less 
generally received, truism that no one can make sound applications 
of even the elements of a scientific subject without a really pro- 
found knowledge of the whole. 

The Paper Science of the present day, that which pretends to 
make the highest science at once interesting and intelligible to all, 
is a disgrace to education generally — a proof that such education 
as even the best of non-specialists receive is incompetent to enable 
them to detect superficiality and confident, because ignorant, smat- 
tering. What a contrast to the carefully thought-out treatises of 
two centuries ago — rich and full, even when wholly speculative — on 
the production of one of which a man spent often the best years of 
his life ! What a contrast to these is the constant flow of trashy 
verbiage from the '' Easy-Writing" Paper Scientist ! He it is who 
is mainly responsible for the state of things we have now to explain. 

The assumed incompatibility of Religion and Science has been 
so often and so confidently asserted in recent times that it has come, 
like the universal knowledge and ability of Lord Brougham, or the 
all-round scientific merits of the " Vestiges of Creation," to be 
taken for granted by the writers of leading articles, etc., and it is 
of course perpetually thrust by them broadcast before their too 
trusting readers. 

But the whole thing is a mistake, and a mistake so grave that no 
true scientific man (unless indeed he be literally a specialist — such as 
a pure mathematician, or a mere mycologist or entomologist) runs, 
in Britain at least, the smallest risk of making it. 

Who are, after all, the people who so loudly assert this so-called 
incompatibility ? Do they, or does even any one of them, show that 
thorough acquaintance with both sides of the question which is 
usually, and I think rightly, imagined to be necessary for the forma- 
tion of a judgment of any value ? When one such presents himself 
it will be time enough for genuine theologians, if not to feel alarm, 



DOES HUMANITY REQUIRE 39 

at all events to be prepared for battle. Hitherto at least it appears 
that the contest has been originated and carried on by the super- 
numeraries, I had almost said the camp-followers, of both classes, 
the scientific and the theological. With a few, and these very 
singular, exceptions, the true scientific men and the true theologians 
of the present day have not yet found themselves under the neces- 
sity of quarreling. 

An ignorant and mischievous supernumerary on the theological 
side takes up old and now exploded views of the nature and mode 
of production of the Bible — asserts (let us say) that every word, 
nay, every letter, in it is divinely inspired and has been divinely 
preserved to us — that its incidental references to object:; of physical 
or natural science must also be scientifically exact. Well may the 
true theologian desire to be preserved from his friendj ! 

" For the son dishonoreth the father, the daughter riseth up 
against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law ; 
a man s enemies are the men of his own house.'* 

Hereupon an equally ignorant and mischievous underling of the 
scientific estabHshment, fancying he has an opportunity of attaining 
the notoriety which is his main object in life, seizes on these absurd 
statements, gravely assumes that they are put forward by the 
masters and not by the underlings, and proceeds with much stage 
effect and clatter to expose their absurdity. The long-enduring 
public, led too often by ignorant though " educated " men (for a 
" scholar" may be, and too often is, altogether innocent of the ver}- 
slightest power of detecting the characteristic difference between 
science and pseudo-science, obvious though it be to the practised 
eye) — the patient public, I say, under such leadership, grows ecstatic 
over the tremendous contest, and hails the fancied victor as among 
the foremost men of science of his time. It is like the terrific sword 
and buckler combat in a melodrama, cheered to the echo, though 
every one knows it is humbug. And thus Religion, which has never 
really been in question, suffers in the judgment of the vulgar. 

The same effect is often produced by a nearly converse process. 
The mischievous scientific camp-follower begins throwing stones 
at what he imagines to be religion ; but, as true religion is some- 
thing very different from the idea he has formed of it, he has of 
course no chance of hitting his mark. 

But the equally mischievous theological underling thinks Jus 
opportunity has come ; and so at it they go, tooth and nail, ham- 
mer and tongs, with plenty of noise and no result, except of course 



40 ANEWREVELATION? 

that Religion again suffers in the eyes of the ignorant, who fancy 
that this tomfoolery carried on in her name really involves her 
interests. They have, besides, a sort of unexpressed notion that 
Religion should be, like Caesar's wife, not only unimpeachable but 
unimpeached — forgetting that a child may easily drive in a nail so 
that a giant may find difficulty in extracting it. 

So much for the discussions on the so-called incompatibility of 
Religion and Science. Almost invariably initiated and carried out 
against the wishes and the convictions of the true leaders on either 
side, they have become a sort of ladder by which hangers-on or 
supernumeraries manage now and then to raise themselves into 
public notice. To do so with the greatest effect they adopt, as a 
rule, the side of wJiat they call Science. A well-known scientific 
man puts it very happily thus : *' The dogs have partaken of the 
children's bread, and are determined to show that they belong to 
the family." It must be allowed .that now and then some of the 
really foremost men have thought it worth their while to confute a 
more than usually loud-mouthed (and therefore popular) opponent, 
but as a body they have as yet found no cause to interfere. 

Mr. Froude, I think, has done much harm by throwing himself 
unsolicited, and in great part unqualified, into this sham-fight of 
underlings. [A knight, as Don Quixote found to his cost, ought 
not to mix in the pastimes or quarrels of carriers and clothworkers.] 
He is quite as one-sided as, though of course from any point of view 
far more effective than, the scribblers with whom, in an evil hour,^ 
he has temporarily associated himself. Had he confined himself 
strictly to the somewhat novel question he has raised, which is 
practically that at the head of this paper, he would have to some 
extent kept clear of these small fry and their perennial chatter, Diis 
aliter vismn ! 

According to Mr. Froude, we are, without being generally con- 
scious of it, living in a period of exceptionally rapid advance. This 
advance consists not so much in material prosperity and scientific 
discovery, as in shaking off, one by one, the trammels of a burden- 
some superstition which we are at length beginning to estimate at 
its true value. 

" Whither these material clianges may be carrying us, it is idle to conjecture. 
Nothing of the same kind has ever been witnessed on the earth before, and there 
is no experience to guide us. The spiritual change is not so unexampled. Phe- 
nomena occurred most curiously analogous at the time of the rise of Christianity ; 



DOES HUMANITY REQUIRE 4I 

and from the singularly parallel course in which at those two periods the intellect 
developed itself, we may infer generally what is likely to come of it. 

" That we have been started out of our old positions, and that we can never 
return to positions exactly the same, is too plain to be questioned. Theologians 
no longer speak with authority. They are content to suggest, and they deprecate 
hasty contradistinction. Those who doubted before now openly deny. Those 
who believed on trust have passed into uncertainty. Those who uphold ortho- 
doxy can not agree on what ground to defend it. Throughout Europe, through- 
out the world, the gravest subjects are freely discussed, and opposite sides may 
be taken without blame from society." " Along the whole line the defending 
forces are falling back, not knowing where to make a stand ; and materialism 
all over Europe stands frankly out, and is respectfully listened to when it affirms 
that the war is over, that the claims of revelation can not be maintained, and that 
the existence of God and of a future state, the origin of man, the nature of con 
science, and the meaning of the distinctions between good and evil, are all open 
questions." 

It is true he gives us a crumb or two of momentary comfort— 

sufficient for the present and perhaps for the next generation. 
\ 

" The entire generation at present alive may probably pass away before the in- 
ward change shows itself markedly in external symptoms. None the less is it 
quite certain that the ark of religious opinion has drifted from its moorings, that it is 
moving with increasing speed along a track which it will never retrace, and 
towards issues infinitely momentous. What are these issues to be ? The thing 
that hath been, that shall be again." 

I do not venture directly to contradict all these assertions. 
Some of them are certainly in part true ; some are at least plausible. 
But I think the situation is enormously exaggerated. The state of 
the real heart-depths of a nation is not to be judged by the froth or 
dross which comes most prominently to the surface. The vices and 
frivolities, whether of fashionable society or of the music-hall cad, 
like the flippant lectures of half-educated materialists and the child- 
ish follies of ritualism, are but as ripples that disturb the surface of 
the water ; while the strong current of common-sense, morality, and 
religion flows on uninterruptedly below. 

What led to the recent marvellous recovery of France ? What 
but the fact that the glaring vices and frivolities, which to casual 
observers were her most prominent feature, did not seriously affect 
the real life of the nation ? Remember what Horace says of the 
similar scum of his own times, and also of the true manhood which 
(till the scum is brushed away) is obscured from the sight of the 
careless observer : 



42 ANEWREVELATION? 

" Non his juventas orta parentibus 
Infecit aequor sanguine Punico — 

****** 
Sed rusticorum mascula militum 
Proles, Sabellis docta ligonibus 
Versare, glebas, et severae 
Matris ad arbitrium recisos 
Portare fustes," ... 

And just as we all know from recent experience that a similar, 
perhaps even a higher, manhood is to be found to a practically 
unlimited extent alike in Britain and in America ; so we may feel 
assured that the great bulk of the sound common-sense people, of 
all classes, in these countries, is at heart leal to religion — of which, 
therefore, it does not ostentatiously make parade. Flippant skeptics 
may, in ordinary times, without great fear of contradiction, assert 
the contrary. But they would be altogether confounded were a 
season of trial, danger, and difficulty to arise, such as would neces- 
sarily call into practical display the simple but profound religious 
convictions of these many true hearts. 

Doubter — if you can be found — think of Elijah and be reas- 
sured ! Thus the second of Mr. Froude's chief reasons for his con- 
viction falls to pieces like the first. Christianity is not '' generally 
doubted." And even if it were, that which is generally doubted 
is by no means necessarily " doubtful." Yet it is solely upon 
grounds so uncertain, or rather so certainly erroneous, that the 
startling conclusions he comes to are based. 

The only passage in Mr. Froude's articles which suggests even 
the slightest hope is the following : 

For centuries states and individuals alike professed to be governed in all that 
they thought and did by the supposed revelation which was given to mankind 
eighteen hundred years ago. Avowed disbelief of it there was none ; of secret, 
silent misgiving there was probably very little. For practical purposes, that 
revelation was accepted as a fact, as little allowing of doubt as the commonest 
phenomena of daily experience. The universal confidence received its first shock 
at the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Just as the original pagan creed 
was made incredible by the legends with which it was overspread, so Christianity 
was overgrown by a forest of extravagant superstitions. Conscience and intelli- 
gence rose in revolt, and tore them to pieces. For a time all was well. The 
weeds were gone ; the faith of the early church was restored in all its simplicity. 
The Huguenots in France, Lutherans in Germany, the Puritans in England and 
Scotland, were as absolutely under the influence of religious belief as the apostles 
and first converts. Providence to them was not a form of speech, but a living 
reality. ' ' 



DOES HUMANITY REQUIRE 43 

With the exception of one sneering epithet, the whole of this 
passage may be accepted as it stands. But what follows ? Instead 
of the obvious conclusion, that the Reformation was not complete, 
having left at least as many blots on dogmatic Christianity as it 
had removed ; and that a second and more sweeping Reformation 
is now urgently required — what is hinted at is the necessity for 
an altogether new revelation, or, at least, a completely new system 
of philosophic belief. 

But the great bulk of the human race can not be philosophers — 
can not even, so far at least as experience has taught us, be scholars. 
Yet surely they are all individually, not merely numerically, as 
important in the eyes of the common Creator (Mr. Froude does 
seem to allow that there is a God, belief in whom is essential to the 
existence of society) as is any, the most erudite, philosopher. 

It would therefore appear, from the most absolutely common- 
sense view — independent of all philosophy and speculation — it 
would appear that the only religion which can have a rational claim 
on our belief must be one suited equally to the admitted necessities 
of the peasant and of the philosopher. And this is one specially 
distinguishing feature of Christianity. While almost all other 
religious creeds involve an outer sense for the uneducated masses 
and an inner sense for the more learned and therefore dominant 
priesthood, the system of Christianity appeals alike to the belief 
of all ; requiring of all that, in presence of their common Father, 
th^y should sink their fancied superiority one over another, and 
frankly confessing the absolute unworthiness wJiich they can not but 
feel, approach their Redeemer with the simplicity and confidence 
of little children. 

" The Garden of Eden is desecrated now by the trampling of controversy, and 
no ingenious reconciliations of religion and science, no rivers of casuistic holy 
water, can restore the ruined loveliness of traditionary faith. But the truth which 
is in religion will assert itself again as it asserted itself before. A society without 
God in the heart of it is not permitted to exist ; and when once more a spiritual 
creed has established itself which men can act on in their lives and believe with their 
whole souls, it is to be hoped that they will have grown wiser by experience, and 
will not again leave the most precious of their possessions to be ruined by the ex- 
travagance of exaggerating credulity. ' ' 

Most true, and yet most false ! But false only because of the 
implied assumption that the "spiritual creed " already vouchsafed 
to us is not one ** which men can act on in their lives, and believe 
with their whole souls." 



44- A NEW REVELATION? 

That men in myriads have already thus believed, and acted on, 
the altogether spiritual creed of the New Testament, is matter of 
absolute certainty. And if in the past, why not in the present and 
in the future ? 

The Founder of Christianity has given for all time the answer to 
those who, discontented with what God has graciously done for 
them, seek a new revelation. " If ye believe not Moses and the 
prophets, neither would ye believe though one rose from the dead. " 

To this there can be no answer except a bold denial of the 
Divinity of Christ. That Christ claimed to be divine we know, 
altogether independently of Scripture, from the historical facts 
connected with His execution. We have His own triumphant 
answer to the question (all-important so far as our present subject is 
concerned): "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for 
another?" But the claim comes out admitted in all its strength in 
the words of the high-priest : " What need we any farther witnesses ? 
ye yourselves have heard the blasphemy." 

All who approach the subject without bias can see from the New 
Testament records how some of the most essential features of Chris- 
tianity were long in impressing themselves on the minds even of the 
Founder's immediate followers. And we could not reasonably have 
expected it to be otherwise. The revelation of Himself which the 
Creator has made by His works we are only, as it were, beginning to 
comprehend. Are we to wonder that Christianity, that second and 
complementary revelation, is also, as it were, only beginning to be 
understood ; or that, in the struggle for light, much that is wholly 
monstrous has been gratuitously introduced, and requires a Refor- 
mation for its removal ? What more likely than that, in the endeavor 
to frame a document for the stamping out of a particular heresy, 
over-zealous clergy should carry the process a ""little too far, and so 
introduce a new and opposite heresy ? But this is no argument 
against Christianity ; rather the reverse. 

It might in fact be asserted, with very great reason, that a 
religion which, like any one of the dogmatic systems of particular 
Christian sects, should be stated to men in a form as precise and 
definite as was the mere ceremonial law, would be altogether an 
anomaly — inconsistent in character with all the other dealings of 
God with man — and altogether incompatible with that Free Will 
which every sane man feels and knows himself to possess. 

P. G. Tait. 



CHAPTER IV. 
THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE.^ 

THE keen saying of Bacon, "there is a superstition in avoiding 
superstition," has been often verified in the history of opinion ; 
but it might have startled the master had he foreseen that its most 
marked example would be furnished in these days by science itself. 
We have had too many champions of Christianity, who weaken its 
cause by denying the results of modern discovery ; we have now 
quite as narrow a type of dogmatists, who mistake their scorn of 
revealed truth for philosophic wisdom. The work^ before us is a rare 
specimen of this latest growth in England and in our own country. 
We opened it, knowing the author to be a man of deserved reputation 
in his own sphere, and hoping for light in regard to the questions which 
employ the best minds of our time ; but we laid it down with the 
conviction, that a thorough knowledge of the spectroscope, or of the 
mysteries of chemical analysis, does not of necessity imply a knowledge 
of theology and Christian history. With this feeling we shall' fr-eely 
examine the book. It has seemed to us the more needful to do it, 
because several of its reviewers, in fighting over the geological issue, 
have left unanswered the false theory of revelation by which the 
whole argument stands or falls. We shall gladly accept every genuine 
fact. But when the most competent scholar in the field of natural 
study, offers us his loose reading and looser logic as the verdict of 
philosophy on religious belief, we shall try him by his own standard ; 
and as he appeals to science, to science he shall go. 

Let us state at the outset the line of the argument which our 
author has given us. It is his purpose to show, by a review of the 
most prominent ages of Christianity, that there has been from first to 
last an irreconcilable conflict between science and dogmatic faith. 
The long record is divided by him into several critical epochs. The 
first struggle of early Christianity ends in the suppression of the 
schools of Alexandria, and is followed by the Southern Reformation, 
as he strangely calls it, in which the tiuth of the unity of God, 

' From the International Review. 

- '• History of the Conflict between Religion and Science," by J. W. Draper, M. D., 
LL.D. New York : Appleton & Co. 



46 THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

destroyed by Christian idolatry, is reaffirmed by the Mohammedan 
religion. The next conflict is as to the nature of the soul, and ends 
in the anathema of the church on the pure, scientific doctrine of 
Averroism. The succeeding conflict is with the dawning science of 
Europe concerning the position and structure of the earth. This is 
followed by the Reformation of Luther. The present is the contro- 
versy between religion and science, as to the government of the world ; 
or the question of supernatural order, and natural law. Such is the 
history which our learned author gathers at last into one conclusion 
Science is progressive. The religion of the Christian Scripture and 
church is in its nature bound by certain unchangeable traditions, which 
must always be opposed to the views affirmed by natural discovery 
We beg the reader to mark clearly the terms of the question. Had 
he sought only to expose the superstitions of the past, his book would 
have been no new discovery of a fact admitted by all reasonable 
Christian men. Had he sought, again, to show that these errors were 
only the crude conditions of our growth, and that we might look for 
ward to an age when science should be found in harmony with the 
essential truths of revelation, we should gladly hail him as a teacher 
But the conflict, in his view, is inherent in the character of revelation 
There is no hope save in the surrender of the whole fabric of a super- 
natural religion. 

Such is the historic argument we are to meet ; and we ma> 
state as clearly the position we shall take against it. We shall not 
identify revelation with any traditional systems of Biblical interpre- 
tation or theology. It is here that such critics are seemingly strong 
only because they can wrest against revelation the weak weapons of it« 
defenders. We claim that Christianity is a revelation of God as a per 
sonal Creator and Father; of the moral condition of man; of the 
gift of redemption in Christ, and of the connection of a life of holiness 
with the Hfe to come. Such truths are in their nature essentially the 
same in every age, because this revelation is fitted to the same spirit- 
ual wants, and has its witness in the moral life of the race. But a« 
this religion is given in the form of historic records, and yet more 
interpreted by men, it must be studied in all such particulars by the 
light of science, of language, and historic criticism. The Scriptures 
are not designed to be the oracle of scientific certainty. Biblical 
and doctrinal learning have their law of gradual progress, as have 
all other departments of knowledge. In this view we should read the 
history of the Christian past ; as the record of a growth of imperfect 
systems indeed, of truth mingled with superstition, yet a record linked 



THE CONFLICT OF KELIGION AND SCIENCE. 4/ 

with the steps of all human civilization under the guidance of God. 
If by this principle we examine the theory of our boastful critic, we 
find that he has neither understood the meaning of revelation, the 
worth of Christian history, nor the claims of its reasonable believers. 

We turn, then, at once to his historic sketch. Instead of any 
general argument, we prefer to follow the method of our author ; 
for we can thus test, step by step, the solidity of his learning, and 
give him the happy privilege of refuting himself. It might be thought 
somewhat singular at first, that he should begin with an elaborate 
story of the conquests of Alexander. But we soon learn his purpose. 
It is necessary for him to prove that the pagan world was not indebted 
to Revelation for the truth of monotheism, but that the doctrine 
came from Persia. We pass over the pages of historic episode, 
which may be useful to some readers not familiar with the common- 
places of that time, and mark the original discoveries of this writer. 
None can deny the genius or learning of that remarkable school, 
which in the later day of Greek wisdom produced such masters as 
Ptolemy and Hipparchus. They were undoubtedly the heralds of 
inductive science. Nor can we doubt, again, that the new impetus 
given to the Greek intellect was largely due to the march of Eastern 
discovery. But we are indebted to our author alone for the information 
that " this great intellectual development was aided by the knowl- 
edge they acquired of the religion of Persia." It is readily under- 
stood that some religious ideas entered from this source into the later 
Jewish system, and in the form of Manichaean theosophy played a 
large part in the Christian heresies ; nay, we may find traces of this 
influence, although in a far less degree, in the Neo-Platonic school. 
But it is neither proved by the remains of that time, nor allowed 
by any historian of repute from Ritter to Ueberweg, that the later 
Greek science was in any way affected by the peculiar tenets of the 
Persian religion. The fancy of this critic, weaves this web of theory 
out of the thinnest facts. Nor would it help him, if it were true, 
since the religion of Persia was no monotheism in that later time. 
It is a question by no means settled among critics, whether such 
a truth was ever held by that people. Yet we are told, again, in 
the most authoritative tone, that " Persia had at first followed the 
monotheism of Zoroaster, and afterward accepted dualism." We need 
only send him to the Avesta for the refutation of his statement. It 
is the conclusion of our ripest scholars, at whose head stands Spiegel, 
the translator of the sacred books, that *' the religion of the Persians 
in the time of Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes, was essentially the 



48 THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

same as it appears in the Avesta. Nay, we learn from the same 
authority, that Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, although he was probably 
the founder of the rehgion, was even in that day, as we may judge 
from the character assigned him by classic writers, a very mythical 
personage. Doubtless, therefore, the Persian, like other branches of 
the Aryan religion, began with the worship of the heavenly bodies, 
and afterward passed into the ritual system of the Avesta. It was, 
indeed far purer than many of the superstitions of the East ; a religion 
which had retained somewhat of the simpHcity of the primal light- 
worship, nearer to the Hebrew in its rejection of idols ; yet it was no 
monotheism, but a dualism, and its mythology had created, beside 
the powers of light and darkness, a host of lesser divinities. We 
commend our author to a more thorough study of a subject, before 
he attempts to invent a theory. 

But we must pass from his historic rambles to his ideas of Greek 
philosophy. Having taught us how the sublime truth of monotheism 
entered from Persia, he will now prove that Greek genius reached in 
that age its highest development, only to be followed by a barbarous 
Christianity. To do this, he must show us that the guiding intellect 
of that age, Aristotle, was a true inductive philosopher, not to be 
confounded with the barren scholastics of the church. But if he is at 
home in the epicylic theory, he is in the cloud-land of fancies when he 
attempts metaphysics. We cite his words : 

" Plato descended from the composition of a primitive idea to particulars ; Aris- 
totle united particulars into a general conception." "The essential principle of 
the Aristotelian philosophy was to rise from particulars to universals, advancing to 
them by induction." " The inductive philosophy thus established is a method of 
great power. To it all modern advances in science are due." 

No statement could more misrepresent the truth. Aristotle, with- 
out doubt, studied nature with more accuracy than any before him, 
and hence had at times what have been called '' luminous antici- 
pations " of science. But to say in any sense whatever, that his 
philosophic method was that of induction, is only possible to those, 
who have gained their ideas of him at second-hand. The method of 
Plato, as well as Aristotle, is to ascend from particulars to universals ; 
but the main difference between them is, that Plato conceived his 
universal ideas as entities, Aristotle held them as mental cognitions. 
The analytic genius of the Stagyrite thus led him to the widest range 
of systematic knowledge. But his method is that of rigid logical 
demonstration ; and none can read his Physics without accepting the 



THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 49 

criticism of Bacon, that he " constructed the world out of his cate- 
gories." It is curious to observe how a superficial thinker like Lewes, 
in attempting to show the beginning of positive science with Aris- 
totle, has refuted himself in mistranslating the famous sentence from 
the Metaphysics, " Art begins, when from a great number of experi- 
ences there is formed one general conception of like cases." But the 
word rendered " experiences " is the exact contrary, " many Im'ST/fm-a ; " 
not an induction of facts, but a logical unity in the mind. We have 
dwelt on this, because it touches the whole argument of our critic. 
Neither Aristotle nor his scholars in the middle age had reached the 
path of experimental science. It was in the order of knowledge, that 
they should first study the problems of human thought. 

We are prepared, after the author's eulogy on the religion of Persia 
and the perfection of later Greek science, for more novel discoveries 
as to the rise and decline of the Christian faith. It is soon disposed 
of. It fills a much smaller place in his view than the astronomy of 
the Museum. There was, it appears, as the result of these Mace- 
donian conquests and the " military domination of Rome," a general 
sentiment of the ** universal brotherhood " of man. The Jewish- 
Christian sect thus at first gained its sway over the pagan world, as a 
sort of *' communism." We may well admire the genius which has 
reached so plain a solution at last of the grandest problem of history ; 
even simpler than that of Mr. Buckle, who wrote the story of 
Christian civilization with Christianity left out. It is not enough for 
such reasoners to recognize in the condition of the Roman world, in 
the decay of pagan worship, and in the social interchange of nations, 
that which gave room for the ideas of a nobler faith ; but we are 
gravely asked to find in that world, lying under the yoke of the Ceesars, 
without liberty, with the most appalling growth of social vices, with 
no belief save in the most swarming superstitions, the natural birth 
of a religion, which purified not only idolatry but the life of the 
household and the state, and has shaped the whole civilization of the 
after time. This is indeed a wonderful instantia crucis of the 
inductive science. But our philosopher does not dwell long on the 
origin of Christianity. Even the simple truth with which it began is 
destined soon to fall away ; and we learn that it soon became a 
distinct paganism. There is probably nothing in history which can 
quite compare with the inventive boldness of this chapter on the 
corruptions of the church. We had long known that there were 
errors and vices in the primitive age ; but we had no conception of 
their extent. It has been discovered by this scholar, that Constan- 



50 THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

tine actually consecrated the ancient pagan rites under a Christian 
form, with the express purpose of conciliating the many heathen of 
the Empire. The Madonna was the Egyptian Isis, with the infant 
Horus in her arms and the crescent moon under her feet. The Feast 
of Purification was an open substitute for the Lupercalia. It is in this 
spirit he writes history ; an instance or two of natural superstition is 
cited as if the spots covered the whole disk of the sun ; and all the 
ages of Christian life, of intellectual battle with pagan error, of 
moral purity or social regeneration are nothing to his scientific mind. 
But we must follow him now, as he enters with much learning 
into the Christian theology of the early age. It will, doubtless, awe 
many of his readers to find him so profound in his citations from the 
Fathers, yet we beg leave to examine a few statements. Our author 
informiS us that Christian doctrine was, in the age of Tertullian, the 
simplest of faiths, but it changed with Augustin into a system of 
revolting dogmas. He quotes at large the famous apology to Severus, 
" The attentive reader will have remarked," he says, '* in Tertullian's 
statement of Christian principles, a complete absence of the doctrines 
of original sin, total depravity, predestination, grace, and atonement." 
Such a mode of dealing with the writings of this father is a little sin- 
gular. It should be known to such a critic that this simple Tertullian 
was the most fertile intellect of the West African church, and did 
more than any other in his age to shape that theology of the Latin 
communion, which was afterward ripened by Augustin. It should 
be known that he is the author of many treatises, full of the most 
subtle discussions of doctrine ; and although Augustin has brought 
into more systematic shape the tenets which our critic specifies, 
each one of them is to be traced in Tertullian. It should be known to 
him that a view of the theology of that time must embrace the fathers 
of the Eastern church, who represent more than the West its noblest 
philosophic thought, and who joined the spirit of Plato with a Christian 
faith in their discussion of the unity of God, freedom, and immortal- 
ity. To present this official paper of TertulHan to the emperor, as an 
epitome of Christian theology, is as absurd, as it would be to send one 
who desires to know the principles of the Novum Organon, to Bacon's 
Apology in the case of the Earl of Essex. Nor is it strange, therefore, 
that we find this choice criticism followed by as lucid a view of Augus- 
tin. Our author gives us a few disjointed passages, and then pounces 
on the Pelagian controversy. It is dismissed by a summary appeal to 
science. We are told that the great point of the controversy was 
** whether death had been in the world before Adam, or was the penalty 



THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 51 

of sin." Pelagius was the unconscious herald of the modern school, 
which proves that long before man, thousands of species and genera 
had died ; and thus the church, in sustaining Augustin, severed the- 
ology from science ! It is indeed, difficult to meet such talk with due 
gravity. Undoubtedly this question was involved in the controversy ; 
but no one, at all acquainted with doctrinal history, is ignorant that 
the real difference between the two was in regard to the nature of 
divine grace and human ability. Nor does it matter at all, in our 
estimate of the great doctor of the Latin church, whether he were 
right or wrong in this particular. Such criticism is as absurd, as to 
doubt Newton's laws of astronomy because he had a fanciful theory 
about the London plague. The task of Augustin was to study the 
deep laws of human nature in conscience and history, to show the truth 
of Christianity in its adaptation as a revelation of redemption to the 
moral want of the race ; and while there are errors in his system, 
derived chiefly from the Platonic philosophy which he followed, no 
competent scholar will deny him his place as one of the noblest teach- 
ers, not only of the Christian church, but of all time. To measure 
him by the method of this critic, is to measure a mountain by a 
microscope. 

At this point our learned author reaches the first step of his con- 
clusion. The barbarous religion of Christ at last seals its hostility 
to science by the closing of the schools at Athens under Justinian. 
It might not be very difficult for us to answer him on his own ground. 
The act of Justinian was, of course, that of a despot. But what had 
that to do with the real progress of science ? There was at that period 
hardly a vestige of Greek genius such as had bloomed in the better 
day of a Ptolemy or Hipparchus, and whatever of intellectual life sur- 
vived, had passed into the Christian church. But it is a deeper defect 
which bHnds him to the intellectual worth of that age. To him there 
is no progress save in the sciences of mechanics and chemistry. It is 
impossible for him to conceive that a religion, which did not produce 
great geometers, or settle the structure of the globe, could have done 
any thing for the race. Had he even got so far as the philosophy of 
Comte, he might have learned that the growth of the human mind 
must begin with the theological and the metaphysical before it can 
reach the scientific stage. Had he known the deeper law of Christian 
history, he would have discovered that, however admirable the knowl- 
edge of nature, the noblest science is that which concerns the moral 
and social life of humanity. It was no loss to the world, if it waited 
a few centuries longer for a Copernicus. The task of the church was 



52 THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

to educate the pagan mind in a purer faith, and when that first step 
was passed, to shape the life of barbarian Europe ; and the same 
Justinian, who closed the Athenian schools, had wisdom enough to 
give the world the Pandects of Roman law. 

But we are now ready for another of the great historical discoveries 
of our author. It is the period which he has called the " Southern 
Reformation." The religion of Mohammed proclaims the unity of 
God against an idolatrous Christianity ; and the church again shows 
itself the enemy of science. It would be hard to find a chapter in 
which so narrow a basis of fact is made to support so huge a pile of 
theory. We are told that the Christian church had introduced the 
worship of Isis in the form of the Madonna ; that Nestorius was con- 
demned for rejecting this idolatry, and when his banished sect spread 
over the East, the Arabian prophet was converted by its teachers. 
But this is not all. " The life of the prophet was devoted to the exten- 
sion of this theological doctrine ; " and hence our historian claims 
for Islamism the leadership of scientific progress, while Christendom 
had lost the truth of the one God. It will be necessary only to turn 
to the history of that age in order to test this theory. Nestorius was 
one of the victims of a harsh theology ; and the church which con- 
demned him, had already been infected by the superstition, which 
ripened later into Mariolatry. But every student knows, that while 
the dispute concerning the deo-oKoc entered into the question, the 
doctrine for which Nestorius was sentenced was that of the separation 
of the two natures in Christ. We may justly lament the spirit of an 
age, which had too far lost in its metaphysical subtleties the living 
power of its own doctrine ; we may not doubt that such a decay left 
Christendom the weak prey of the Arab invader. But to say in any 
wise that the church had renounced its faith in the one God, or that 
its partial superstition could be called idolatry, is only extravagant 
nonsense. We can thus fairly understand the relation of our religion 
to that wonderful and brilliant era of Saracenic life. History has cast 
a much clearer light in our day on the character of Mohammed, than 
when he was wont to be treated as the arch impostor; it has shown 
that he was indebted to Jewish, probably to Nestorian sources for 
much of his doctrine ; and that above all, the faith in the one God 
in spite of blended errors, made that religion the conqueror of 
the East. But it does not seem to occur to our author that this very 
fact is the refutation of his strange claim for Islamism. He has 
admitted that the religion of the Koran is only a bastard form of 
Christianity, and thus he directly allows that all the progress he 



THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 53 

claims for the doctrines of Mohammed is due to the belief, which he 
rejects as at war with science. Christianity gave the power which 
overthrew idolatry ; Mohammed gave the legends of the Koran, 
the sensuality and the martial fanaticism. Nor is it less astounding 
to hear a philosophic historian talk of Islamism as the "Southern 
Reformation." Undoubtedly the monotheistic faith of Islam changed 
the polytheism of the East, and was in that respect the source 
of a higher civilization ; but we are not aware that it converted 
any part of Christendom. It subdued the decaying empire by force 
of arms, and the fresh strength of an Arab people was mightier than 
an old, corrupt civilization. But what has that to do with a Southern 
Reformation? 

Yet we have not ended the paradox. Our author is not content 
with giving just praise to the Saracenic civilization, but he must hold 
it up as far grander than that of Christian Europe during the same 
period. We shall not yield to him in our admiration of that marvel- 
ous age. The history of the world has no chapter more brilliant than 
that of the Caliphs, who won a victory grander than had been achieved 
by the scimitar. That civilization grew Hke the tropic plant, which 
reaches its full beauty in a season. But it shows an utter want of his- 
toric insight to compare it with the development of the Western race. 
The genius of the Arab, like all of the Semitic stock, was narrow, 
although intense in the range of its ideas. It could interpret the 
works of Greek science ; but it could not lay the foundations of a 
great social poHty, or give birth to a literature and art like that of 
Europe. Even in science we have the judgment of Whewell, that the 
original contributions of Arabian schools are slight. And it is a grave 
mistake to speak of this progress, as if in any sense the religion of 
Mohammed were more favorable to the cause of science, than the Chris- 
tianity of the church. Our critic might well consult a Semitic scholar, 
not likely to be too partial in his religious tastes, Ernest Renan, who 
will teach him that the bigots of the Koran were more hostile to the 
study of Greek philosophy. than any in the darkest day of the Latin 
communion. Thus the age of the Mohammedan civilization reached 
its bloom only to decay, and has left nothing save a splendid mem- 
ory. But it was the necessity of the Christian civilization, as it was 
to endure, to have a slower growth. The church of the seventh cen- 
tury was busy with the education of the hordes that overturned south- 
ern and middle Europe ; and after the mind of the continent had been 
trained in religious faith, in social order, in the fusion of races, in the 
development of a rich, manifold life, it could ripen a literature, an art. 



54 THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

and a science also, which should survive when Islamism had passed 
away forever. 

But our historian has not quite closed his eulogy of Mohammedan 
wisdom. Not only in regard to the unity of God was the Christian 
church opposed to science; but in the next conflict concerning the 
nature of the soul we are to find the same sad bigotry. Averroes, the 
great Arabic commentator of Aristotle, taught the doctrine of emana- 
tion, which according to this critic is the same with the modern 
theory of evolution ; his learning passed from Spain into the Chris- 
tian schools, and was at last condemned by the church. It is strange 
indeed, that in his zeal to array science against rehgion our eager 
champion should have made such blunders in regard to the system 
which he praises as genuine philosophy. He has found in Aristotle 
the master of the inductive method ; and he now, with greater lack 
of learning, accepts the doctrine of his commentator. Yet he should 
have known that Averroes, or Ibn Roschd, is, in the opinion of the 
most competent scholars, not a true interpreter of Aristotle in his 
theory of emanation. The teaching of the Greek sage, as clearly 
stated in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics is, that there exists an 
active intellect, present to the human soul, yet distinct from the pas- 
sive or passional nature. There are other passages from his treatise 
on the soul, which speak of this active intellect as alone incorrupti- 
ble. Hence the question arose, whether he held this universal mind 
to be impersonal, so that there could be no personal, individual being 
after death. The difference of view on this weighty point, is the 
dividing line between the Christian disciples of Aristotle and the 
system of Averroes. To omit all other authorities, we need only cite 
the learned work of Renan on the Arabian sage, which our critic seems 
to have skimmed just enough to mistake. Aristotle, as even Renan 
admits, has not clearly expressed himself on this point ; but it was per- 
haps from some later Greek commentators, as Alexander of Aphrodi- 
sias, that Averroes borrowed his idea. His system is that of a thor- 
ough pantheism. It starts with the conception of one indivisible soul, 
impersonal, emanating through all, individual in none ; and thus ends 
in the denial of a personal immortality. But our critic has not only 
confounded the view of the Greek master with this notion of emana- 
tion ; he has strangely identified it with the doctrine of evolution. 
Yet the two are very opposites. The theory of Averroes is a master- 
piece of metaphysical speculation ; it begins with the most abstract 
idea of being, and reasons downward to all souls as partakers of 
divinity. The theory of evolution is of a natural life, known only in 



THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 55 

phenomena, passing from the lowest embryotic form to organic com- 
pleteness, yet by the very nature of inductive reasoning excluding 
all possible idea of being. Evolution admits no teleological view. 
Aristotle and his disciple held that " God and nature do nothing in 
vain " (De Coelo). 

But we need spend no more words in showing this error. We leave 
the critic in the hands of our positive sages, who will hardly forgive 
him for indorsing the most subtle of metaphysical ideas, as science. 
We need only turn at last to the absurdity of the charge against the 
Christian church. It is so far from a conflict between religion and 
science, that we may justly call the controversy a defense of the 
sound science of the mind against the most baseless speculation. 
We have no wish to defend the philosophy of the scholastic time, or 
deny the worth of the knowledge that replaced its barren schools, 
but we may claim at least that it shall not be loosely sneered at by 
every half scholar, who can prate of the ** dark ages," yet understands 
nothing of the intellectual power that grappled with the problems of 
human thought. It is indeed one of the most singular features of 
that period, that it joined with its ecclesiastic spirit the utmost free- 
dom of inquiry ; nor do we need a better proof than the fact that 
Averroism itself could have so strong an influence on its opinions, and 
even men like those of the later school of Padua, could remain public 
teachers, while they were sceptics in regard to the deepest truths of 
the Christian religion. It was only when the doctrine of the Arabian 
commentator appeared in an avowed pantheism, that it was rejected ; 
nor was it an act of blind church authority, but Albert the Great 
appeals to Aristotle himself in his masterly defense. If, therefore, our 
critic wishes to sustain the theory of absorption into the divine 
essence as a truth of modern science, his conflict is not with religion 
alone, but with the best reason of every age. 

We come now to nearer times, and conflicts where we shall not be 
compelled to criticise so closely our author's vague learning, but can 
dismiss his assumptions with fewer words. The next battle between 
religion and science is as to the nature of the world. The old story of 
Copernicus and Galileo appears again, and the persecutions of the 
church are recorded with much eloquence. No one, we suppose, even 
the narrowest of Roman ecclesiastics, would defend to-day the 
ignorance of that time; but it was reserved for this writer to discover 
that the Copernican theory is " opposed to revealed truth." We are 
gravely assured that Copernicus himself was aware of this. It is hard 
indeed to reason with such a logician. He must have read history 



56 THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

with strange eyes, if he does not know that such a theory, grand as 
it was, could only be slowly accepted at that time ; that men of 
unquestioned science were doubters, as well as half-educated priests ; 
that it was not wonderful if the geocentric view, the most natural to 
the unscientific mind, should be sustained by appeal to the language 
of the Scriptures. But it is worse than absurd, when he thus attempts 
to fasten on revealed truth the responsibility for all the imperfections 
of human knowledge. It is the best evidence that there is no conflict 
between science and religion, that the system of Copernicus has 
taken its just place in the belief of Christian interpreters as well as of 
astronomers. None can be found in our age who would regard the 
language of Scripture as other than that of popular, phenomenal 
speech : and he who speaks of the discovery " as opposed to revealed 
truth," only proves a prejudice blinder than that of the most slavish 
literalist. We cannot indeed fail to observe how this spirit peeps 
out in page after page of our author's writings. It is not for the prog- 
ress of astronomy, after all, that we are to be grateful, but for the 
fact that it has relieved us of our Christian superstition as to the im- 
mortahty of man. We are told that the result of all our knowledge 
of the stars is " that man, his pleasures or pains, are of no conse- 
quence ; " that a philosopher must rise above the vulgar error of be- 
lieving that " these gigantic bodies have no other purpose than what 
is assigned by theologians, to give light to us." And is our author 
unaware, that some of the truest Christian minds, before and after 
Chalmers, have accepted the reasoning of modern astronomy as prov- 
ing the likelihood of other inhabited worlds, and so far from lessen- 
ing our hope of human redemption, as enlarging our ideas of the good- 
ness of God and the sphere of our immortahty ? But this is lost on 
our philosophic author. Giordano Bruno, closes this chapter, and it is 
strange with what perverse ingenuity an instance of church cruelty is 
turned into an encomium on pantheism. We are not only to repro- 
bate the men who burned him, but to enroll him among the martyrs 
of truth, and ** erect his statue under the dome of St. Peter's ! " 

Here, then, we reach the views of our author in regard to 
the Protestant Reformation ; and although he has placed before it 
a chapter on the age of the globe, we take the liberty of postponing 
it for the sake of chronological order. The Reformation is, in his 
phrase, the conflict respecting the criterion of truth. He begins with 
a general sketch of the vain attempts of the church to enforce its doc- 
trines, and lays down as the principle of the Reformers the right of 
private judgment. But we are told that, " so far as science is con- 



THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. $7 

cerned, nothing is owed to the Reformation." The leaders " were 
determined to banish philosophy from the church." It is not a little 
amusing that in proof of this he has cited Luther's denunciation of 
Aristotle. Had he read the books of Luther, or known the spirit of 
his age, he would have learned that the scholasticism of the Papal 
church, the Aristotelian logic which had frozen the life of the Gospel, 
called forth the wrath of the German apostle ; and we can pardon 
his vehemence, when we know from his own history how hard was 
the battle of faith against tradition. The protest against Aristotle 
was the same in regard to the truth of religion, as that of Bacon 
in philosophy against the '* fruitless categories " of the school learn- 
ing. Our critic sees in it only the hatred of religion to science. But 
the gravamen of the charge against the Reformation is stronger than 
this. It was '' the fatal maxim, that the Bible contained the sum of 
all knowledge,'* " the Procrustean bed of the Pentateuch," that made 
it the enemy of all progress in scientific discovery. We have here the 
same deplorable misconception of history, which we have seen from 
first to last in this volume. It is clear enough that the science of 
Biblical interpretation was not far advanced among the Protestant 
Reformers. The principle of the supreme authority of the Scriptures 
was their noble weapon against the traditions of Rome ; nor was it 
strange that it should be mistaken for a theory of verbal infallibility, 
which a more thorough knowledge must correct. It was enough for 
them that they opene.d the sealed book, and gave it to the study of 
Christian men. To ignore the worth of the Reformation for history, 
because Luther and Calvin did not understand the later results of 
natural research in their bearing on the origin of the earth and man, 
is unworthy of one who professes to write a philosophic history. The 
masterly criticism of the great German historian, Neander, gives us 
the true estimate of the Reformation. Had it not been for the reli- 
gious Hfe, which stirred the mind of the world, all the discoveries of 
science and the growth of letters would have done little for the civiH- 
zation of Europe. But the later history of Protestant thought is evi- 
dently as unknown to our author as its beginnings. He has given us 
the names of a few scholars, who seem to him more advanced in sound 
learning; yet the meager list proves how little he has studied its prog- 
ress in the interpretation of the Scripture, or the promotion of a 
Christian science. To him it is merely a religion somewhat more tol- 
erable than that of the Vatican. The only Protestantism he accepts 
is that which has entirely renounced its faith in a supernatual reve- 
lation. There can be in his view no alternative, save the dullest 



58 THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

adherence to the traditional theology of the past, or to fling away 
every truth of Christianity. He looks with " cold impassiyeness'' on 
all this history since the Reformation, as of less moment than that of 
a few fossil remains in some pre-Adamite cavern. 

We can thus pass to the remaining chapters on the results of more 
modern discovery. The question of the formation of the earth and 
its age, is presented to us with a full array of the wonders opened by 
men of science in the last half century. We accept readily every 
sound conclusion which has been reached. But when we are told by 
our critic, that there is an irreconcilable conflict between revelation 
and modern geology, we simply reply that it is an absurd assumption. 
There is nothing whatever in a reasonable view of the Mosaic cos- 
mogony, which forbids the belief that the earth has passed through a 
long series of formations; nay, we hold that our knowledge of the 
Scriptures has been vastly enlarged by the light thrown on the pri- 
meval history of man by the Bible of the rocks. It may indeed be well 
for us to wait until we have some more fixed arithmetic than that 
of our author, who talks of thousands of thousands of years preceding 
our historic era. Such extravagance has naturally created doubt. 
But the progress of Christian science on this subject is enough to 
show that there is no conflict in any warrantable sense. There have 
been and are those who have feared that the book of Genesis might 
lose its truth, if it did not contain a scientific account of earth and 
man, and who have thus resorted to very forced interpretations. But 
each step of discovery has had its just influence. There is no intelli- 
gent mind which does not accept the geological view of the gradual 
work of creation, or the facts which science has established as to the 
character of the deluge. Nor is there any result as to the antiquity 
of the race, which will fail to be received, whenever the vague 
theories of the hour shall be finally settled. The history of the race 
is not embraced of necessity in the annals of the Hebrew family. 
We shall in all such questions arrive at as clear a conviction, as we 
have already of the truth of the Copernican theory. It is to this 
the whole progress of BibHcal study is surely tending ; and if there 
are naturalists, who know more of the spectroscope than the Scrip- 
tures, who misquote Augustin and Luther, yet call themselves schol- 
ars, we may allow for the unscientific defects of some Christian 
divines. 

One last point remains. It is that of the government of the world 
by divine intervention or unvarying law. We have here the fullest 
exposition of the belief of our author. All the brilliant discoveries 



THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 59 

or theories of modern time, the nebular hypothesis, the wonders of 
organic evolution, the correlation of forces, are brought together in 
this chapter as centering in this one truth of natural law. This is to 
decide forever the fate of Revelation. Christianity declares a super- 
natural Deity. Science proves a fixed, unchanging order. We accept 
this question as the highest for our modern thought ; but we reject 
utterly his statement that it is a conflict between Christianity and 
science. It is to the peculiar character of the charge, which this 
writer brings against the claims of Revelation, that we ask attention, 
since it involves the weightiest point of modern unbelief. The relig- 
ion of the Bible, we are told, gives us only a series of '' miraculous 
interventions." There have been, undoubtedly, too many defenders 
of Christianity in past years, who claimed that a miracle was the sus- 
pension or infraction of a law of nature ; and to science itself we owe 
a large debt, in that it has given us, since the contrgversies with the 
English deists of the last century, a truer conception of law. If there 
be a conclusion, as this wise man should know, in which all Chris- 
tian thinkers agree, it is that a miracle is the action of a divine and 
higher law, which does not suspend but subordinates what we call 
laws of nature. If we accept the truth of a personal God, we need 
not doubt the possibility or probability of a special revelation. There 
can be, therefore, no chasm between the Christian belief and the 
results of modern science. It is rather in these grand discoveries of 
unity of force, throughout the ages of development, that we find 
higher proofs of one living mind, one divine plan. But it is with the 
false science, which recognizes in this order only an impersonal force, 
a law without a mind, that we have the real conflict of our time. 
Christianity is not the issue. It is between atheism and faith in 
God. Nor is it a small service which a bold thinker hke Mill has done, 
in having proven that the vague theism of the last century is as 
untenable as Christianity to him who believes in nothing beyond 
the phenomena of nature. We are content, therefore, to leave the 
question here. If our philosopher is prepared to claim for science 
that it is identical with an undisguised atheism, we can fully under- 
stand the drift of his reasoning. 

With this study of so remarkable a work, we are now quite 
prepared for the conclusion. It is with a triumphant appeal to the 
gathered evidence of all ages, that the author declares science the 
only true test of knowledge, and sets aside the authority of reve- 
lation. We were summoned, at the opening of the volume, to the 
death-bed of paganism ; and we now have the funeral service read 



6o THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

anew over the remains of Christianity. It would be indeed a relief, 
if we could fairly understand him as only passing sentence on the 
false theories which have obscured Christian truth ; but although 
he levels his bolts chiefly against the Syllabus, it is too plain from the 
chapters we have reviewed, that his argument is against the claims 
of all supernatural religion. We cannot quite determine what may 
be his creed, whether, as we infer from here and there a sentence, the 
vague theism of a former type, or the more outspoken materialism 
of our own day ; but in either case we can fully appreciate the ground 
of his denial. We, too, will draw our conclusion, which we trust all 
our readers will acknowledge after this examination of the argument. 
It is, in a word, the utter misconception of the character of Revela- 
tion and of Christian history, which from first to last has led to this 
imaginary conflict between science and religion. He has begun with 
the false idea that Christianity is to be identified with the theories of 
Biblical interpretation and theology, fastened on it in its early age ; 
and his attempt has been from that point of view to dwell on the 
mistakes and superstitions of the past, without the least admission 
of its growth. Such a caricature of our religion is unworthy of a 
scholar. It has been the empty sophism of unbelief from the first 
until now. Let any blind or malignant critic read the Fathers only 
to find in them some fanciful interpretations of Jewish history, while 
he passes by their noblest ideas of the divine nature or of Christian 
life ; let him hunt among the doctors of the middle age for every 
absurdity in regard to the substance of soul or matter, and ignore 
their masterly discussion of the deepest problems of thought ; let 
him judge the past by the measure of the present, and forget all 
the good it has done in the slow formation of the mind or social 
character, and he will find enough to gratify his doubt. Yet the 
author's own historic sketch is the refutation of his view. There is 
not a single fact of importance which he has not distorted. There 
is not a single point of Christian doctrine or history, which does 
not appear through the smoked glass of his theory. But what is 
it, after all, that his record of the conflicts of the past has proven ? 
If in every age the progress of science has been impeded by religious 
superstition, the same history shows that the truth has risen above 
the dogmatism of the day. Each example, down to our own time, 
witnesses that the settled results of knowledge have been accepted, 
not only by men of science, but by the most intelligent minds among 
Christian believers. Our author wrote, some years ago, a work on 
the " Intellectual Development of Europe." We commend him to a 



THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 6l 

deeper study of that subject. If he reads the history of Christianity. 
as even a thinker of sceptical views but of large and generous mind 
may do, he will find in it the same law of development as in all 
branches of science. It will be clear that there has been as slow a 
growth, as long a conflict with traditional ideas in the study of 
chemistry or of medicine, as in the theological systems of any time. 
We might take the example of Biblical interpretation, and show how 
from the early allegorical methods of the Fathers it has steadily gone 
forward, by the more thorough study of language, by the light cast 
on it from historic and Oriental research, and by the influence in later 
days of natural discovery, until it rightly claims the rank of sacred 
science. And if with a deeper view than that of tracing the intel- 
lectual development alone, if with a Christian eye he will read the 
moral and social record of our religion, it will be to him a history 
which alone explains the whole civilization of the past ; in every age 
amid its errors he will yet trace a law of growth ; in the early time 
he will recognize a divine truth, transforming the world from idolatry 
to the faith in one God and a purer life ; in the darkest years of a 
despotic church, a discipline of law needed for the education of 
mankind. 

Such is our view of Christian history ; and in this light we may 
briefly sum the argument, as it bears on the grave questions that 
weigh on the mind of our own time. If indeed the spirit of this 
writer were in any true sense that of modern science, we might well 
despair of reconciliation. But we will not confound its noble aims 
with those who so misrepresent it. There is not and cannot be any 
conflict between religion and science with those who understand the 
mutual relation of each. It is the province of science to study 
freely the facts of nature and of human history ; and whatever it veri- 
fies by its sure induction, must be admitted by all reasonable men. 
Any theory of Scripture, at variance with the demands of this just 
canon of criticism, is untenable, and must pass away before the 
growing convictions of Christian scholars. It is a truth to be learned, 
and deeply learned by the defenders of the faith, that their efforts 
to rear the sacred word into the oracle of scientific truth has been 
one of the strongest weapons in the hands of unbelief. But while we 
grant this to science, there is an equal, nay, a greater lesson to be 
learned on the other side. It is, we repeat, the province of Chris- 
tianity to teach those truths which do not lie within the sphere of 
nature, but belong to the moral and spiritual history of mankind. 
The being of a personal Creator and Providence ; the fact of evil in 



62 THE CONFLICT OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 

the conscience of the race ; the presence of a Divine Power in humar 
history ; and the relation of this Hfe with a personal Hfe to come, are 
neither proved nor disproved by any inquiries into the structure of 
the globe and the origin of man. Yet this unreasonable conflict 
has been forced on religion by a school of naturalists, who mask their 
materialism under the name of science, and because nature teaches 
only phenomena, deny all knowledge of a God beyond force, or a life 
beyond that of these physical atoms. This philosophy is as untrue 
to the methods of science as it is to the teaching of Christianity. 
There can be no reconciliation in such a case. But we need not fear 
for the result, in behalf of religious or of intellectual truth. Although 
we may not hope for a speedy adjustment of such grave problems, 
he must have read poorly the history of philosophic opinions, who 
does not see in this a transition time ; nor may we doubt that the 
materialistic tendency has already reached its worst extravagance, and 
will pass away as like errors have passed. Science itself will reject 
the vagaries of those who have turned it into a speculation ; it will 
gather up the facts which a Darwin or a Huxley have found, while 
theii: theories will be forgotten. Meantime, we may be content with 
the wise saying of an English divine, that ^* patience is the true 
temper of our age : " we may be sure, that the only conflict Chris- 
tianity can have, is with the false spirit of those who misrepresent it ; 
the only weapons it needs, those of sound learning and fearless study 

of the truth. 

E. A. Washburn. 



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